For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.
MATTHEW ARNOLDNot a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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It is – last stage of all When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man
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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.
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Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.
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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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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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For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.
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At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.
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Weep bitterly over the dead, for he is worthy, and then comfort thyself; drive heaviness away: thou shall not do him good, but hurt thyself.
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France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.
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Art still has truth. Take refuge there.
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Come, dear children, let us away; Down and away below!
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Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
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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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Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
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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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD