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 ARNOLDLife is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
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All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.
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It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.
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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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Once read thy own breast right, And thou hast done with fears.
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Journalism is literature in a hurry.
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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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Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
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How many minds–almost all the great ones–were formed in secrecy and solitude!
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Sanity — that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.
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Style … is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.
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Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
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Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
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Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming
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They… who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
MATTHEW ARNOLD