One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common–discontent.
MATTHEW ARNOLDOne thing only has been lent to youth and age in common–discontent.
MATTHEW ARNOLDAh! two desires toss about The poet’s feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.
MATTHEW ARNOLDFor poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.
MATTHEW ARNOLDUse your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.
MATTHEW ARNOLDTime, so complain’d of, Who to no one man Shows partiality, Brings round to all men Some undimm’d hours.
MATTHEW ARNOLDThe freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
MATTHEW ARNOLDIs it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the sky, to have loved, to have thought, to have done?
MATTHEW ARNOLDI do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today.
MATTHEW ARNOLDIf 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 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 ARNOLDNow the great winds shoreward blow Now the salt tides seaward flow Now the wild white horses play Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
MATTHEW ARNOLDThe true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
MATTHEW ARNOLDAll knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.
MATTHEW ARNOLDThe 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 ARNOLDSanity — 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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD