Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
MATTHEW ARNOLDLife is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
-
-
Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Philistinism! – We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
They… who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
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 ARNOLD -
Art still has truth. Take refuge there.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Below 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 ARNOLD -
Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
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!
MATTHEW ARNOLD