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.
MATTHEW ARNOLDFor poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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Philistinism! – We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.
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Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.
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I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.
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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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This strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims.
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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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Ah! two desires toss about The poet’s feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.
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Genius is mainly an affair of energy.
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Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one
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Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.
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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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For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.
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Come, dear children, let us away; Down and away below!
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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.
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Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
MATTHEW ARNOLD