Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
MATTHEW ARNOLDWaiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
MATTHEW ARNOLDWhoever 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.
MATTHEW ARNOLDBelow the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.
MATTHEW ARNOLDTis 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.
MATTHEW ARNOLDHistory – a vast Mississippi of falsehoods
MATTHEW ARNOLDIt is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.
MATTHEW ARNOLDI 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.
MATTHEW ARNOLDNor bring, to see me cease to live, Some doctor full of phrase and fame, To shake his sapient head, and give The ill he cannot cure a name.
MATTHEW ARNOLDFor 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 ARNOLDThe 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.
MATTHEW ARNOLDHowever, 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.
MATTHEW ARNOLDI keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.
MATTHEW ARNOLDLife is not having and getting, but being and becoming
MATTHEW ARNOLDCulture 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 ARNOLDAh! two desires toss about The poet’s feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.
MATTHEW ARNOLDConduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.
MATTHEW ARNOLD