For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.
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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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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However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications.
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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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All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.
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Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
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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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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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Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
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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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Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.
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They… who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
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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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I knew the mass of men conceal’d Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal’d They would by other men be met With blank indifference.
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The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
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Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the sky, to have loved, to have thought, to have done?
MATTHEW ARNOLD