Ah! two desires toss about The poet’s feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.
MATTHEW ARNOLDAh! two desires toss about The poet’s feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.
MATTHEW ARNOLDAll knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.
MATTHEW ARNOLDI 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 ARNOLDGenius is mainly an affair of energy.
MATTHEW ARNOLDNature’s great law, and the law of all men’s minds? To its own impulse every creature stirs: Live by thy light, and Earth will live by hers.
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.
MATTHEW ARNOLDThe pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
MATTHEW ARNOLDWhoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.
MATTHEW ARNOLDHowever, 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 ARNOLDCulture, 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 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 ARNOLDI do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today.
MATTHEW ARNOLDTo have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
MATTHEW ARNOLDThe grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
MATTHEW ARNOLDOne thing only has been lent to youth and age in common–discontent.
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 ARNOLD