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.
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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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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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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Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
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France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.
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The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
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Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.
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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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Nature’s great law, and the law of all men’s minds? To its own impulse every creature stirs: Live by thy light, and Earth will live by hers.
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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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I am bound by my own definition of criticism : a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.
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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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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.
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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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Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
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One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common–discontent.
MATTHEW ARNOLD