Matthew Arnold Quotes

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.

Nature’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.

Art still has truth. Take refuge there.

Genius is mainly an affair of energy.

Style … is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.

To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.

Now 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.

A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time.

Ah! two desires toss about The poet’s feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.