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.
MATTHEW ARNOLDCulture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
-
-
History – a vast Mississippi of falsehoods
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
The sophist sneers: Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong! The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng! Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
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 ARNOLD -
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
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 -
Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Once read thy own breast right, And thou hast done with fears.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
They… who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Tis 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 ARNOLD -
Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.
MATTHEW ARNOLD