Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
MATTHEW ARNOLDThe sophist sneers: Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong! The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng! Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well — but ’tis not true!
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Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming
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Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
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Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
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Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
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Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
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Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.
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To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.
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Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.
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Tis not to see the world As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes, And heart profoundly stirred; And weep, and feel the fullness of the past, The years that are not more.
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Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.
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Style … is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.
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Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.
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If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.
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Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.
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The power of the Latin classic is in character , that of the Greek is in beauty . Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.
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Journalism is literature in a hurry.
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Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows Like the wave; Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men. Love tends life a little grace, A few sad smiles; and then, Both are laid in one cold place, In the grave.
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With aching hands and bleeding feet We dig and heap, lay stone on stone; We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day, and wish ’twere done. Not till the hours of light return All we have built do we discern.
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For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.
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The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere to the subtle, contriving head.
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It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.
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Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
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Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one
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Once read thy own breast right, And thou hast done with fears.
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Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.
MATTHEW ARNOLD