With aching hands and bleeding feet We dig and heap, lay stone on stone; We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day, and wish ’twere done. Not till the hours of light return All we have built do we discern.
MATTHEW ARNOLDJoy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows Like the wave; Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men. Love tends life a little grace, A few sad smiles; and then, Both are laid in one cold place, In the grave.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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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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Ah, love, let us be true To one another!
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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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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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And we forget because we must and not because we will.
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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.
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The need of expansion is as genuine an instinct in man as the need in a plant for the light, or the need in man himself for going upright. The love of liberty is simply the instinct in man for expansion.
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And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well — but ’tis not true!
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Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
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The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as they are.
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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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Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
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How many minds–almost all the great ones–were formed in secrecy and solitude!
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Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
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I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today.
MATTHEW ARNOLD