If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers.
MATTHEW ARNOLDYes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
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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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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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To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.
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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 is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one
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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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Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.
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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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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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And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.
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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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Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
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On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.
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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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD