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 ARNOLDSanity — 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.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is ready.
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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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Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
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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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The 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.
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Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.
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Time, so complain’d of, Who to no one man Shows partiality, Brings round to all men Some undimm’d hours.
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All the live murmur of a summer’s day.
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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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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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History – a vast Mississippi of falsehoods
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And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.
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They… who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
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For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.
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It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.
MATTHEW ARNOLD