Culture, 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 Arnold
Topics: Culture
But each day brings its petty dust our soon-choked souls to fill, and we forget because we must, and not because we will.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Memory
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Universities, Education, Colleges
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Journalism, Journalists
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Men
‘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
Topics: The Past
With aching hands and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day, and wish ’twere done.
Not till the hours of light return
All we have built as we discern.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Retirement
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Perfection, Light
This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Haste, The Past
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
Topics: Growth
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Death, Truth, Dying
Resolve to be thyself: and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Self-love, Self-Discovery, Awareness, Realization, Being Ourselves, Acceptance, Self-Knowledge
Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Secrets of Success
Cruel, but composed and bland,
Dumb, inscrutable and grand,
So Tiberius might have sat,
Had Tiberius been a cat.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Cats
Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Culture
With close-lipped Patience for our only friend, Sad Patience, too near neighbor to Despair.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Patience
People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is. Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Authors & Writing
Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Goals
Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Morals
We must hold fast to the austere but true doctrine as to what really governs politics and saves or destroys states. Having in mind things true, things elevated, things just, things pure, things amiable, things of good report; having these in mind, studying and loving these, is what saves states.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Truth
One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common—discontent.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Discontent
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
Topics: Writing
Men of culture are the true apostles of equality.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Culture
Mind is a light which the Gods mock us with To lead false those who trust it.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Mind
Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Dreams
Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.
—Matthew Arnold
Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived the light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done, to have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes?
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Blessings, Living
Experience—making all futures, fruits of all the pasts.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Experience
The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere to the subtle, contriving head.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Intelligence
Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Hope
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Edward Lear English Humorist, Illustrator
- Leigh Hunt British Author
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti British Poet, Artist
- Thomas Hood British Poet, Humorist
- A. E. Housman English Scholar, Poet
- John Keats English Poet
- Gerard Manley Hopkins English Poet
- Hilaire Belloc British Writer, Poet
- Robert Bridges English Poet
- Christopher Hitchens Anglo-American Social Critic
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