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.
MATTHEW ARNOLDOne thing only has been lent to youth and age in common–discontent.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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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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Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
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Time, so complain’d of, Who to no one man Shows partiality, Brings round to all men Some undimm’d hours.
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For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.
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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.
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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.
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Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
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All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.
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They… who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
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A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time.
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Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
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Journalism is literature in a hurry.
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At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.
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Greatness is a spiritual condition.
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Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
MATTHEW ARNOLD






