The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.
MATTHEW ARNOLDAnd that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
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Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.
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Genius is mainly an affair of energy.
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The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
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How many minds–almost all the great ones–were formed in secrecy and solitude!
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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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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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History – a vast Mississippi of falsehoods
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This strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims.
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And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and hustle by; And never once possess our soul Before we die.
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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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Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.
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And we forget because we must and not because we will.
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To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
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All the live murmur of a summer’s day.
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For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.
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If there ever comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a force such as the world has never known.
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But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.
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All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.
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Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
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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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Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
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Sanity — that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.
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Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration.
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Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
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Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.
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