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
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
Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Ideas
If experience has established any one thing in this world, it has established this: that it is well for any great class and description of men in society to be able to say for itself what it wants, and not to have other classes, the so-called educated and intelligent classes, acting for it as its proctors, and supposed to understand its wants and to provide for them. A class of men may often itself not either fully understand its wants, or adequately express them; but it has a nearer interest and a more sure diligence in the matter than any of its proctors, and therefore a better chance of success.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Class
The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Morality, Religion
Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Culture
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
Greatness is a spiritual condition.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Greatness, Greatness & Great Things
Resolve to be thyself: and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Being Ourselves, Realization, Self-Discovery, Self-Knowledge, Self-love, Acceptance, Awareness
They… who await
No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Fate
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Men
They who await no gifts from chance have conquered fate.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Fortune, Luck
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
Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Death
Culture, 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 Arnold
Topics: Culture
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Poetry
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Colleges, Universities, Education
Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Secrets of Success
Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Hope
Light half-believers of our casual creeds, who never deeply felt, nor clearly will d, whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds, whose vague resolves never have been fulfilled.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Belief
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Perfection, Light
Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: America
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
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
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
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening…
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Cities, City Life
Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Perfection, Culture
One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common—discontent.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Discontent
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
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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