Matthew Arnold Quotes

Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.

Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

Not deep the poet sees, but wide.

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

If there ever comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a force such as the world has never known.

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.

And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well — but ’tis not true!

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.