Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Matthew Arnold (English Poet, Critic)

Matthew Arnold (1822–88) was an English Victorian poet and literary and social critic. He made it his mission to censure the boorishness of the English, finding in ‘culture’ the cure for contemporary ills and a potent help towards the formation of human character. His theories were mostly responsible for the establishment of English literature as a “core” subject in schools and universities.

Arnold is renowned particularly for his classical attacks on the contemporary tastes and manners of the “Barbarians” (the aristocracy,) the “Philistines” (the commercial middle class,) and the “Populace.” He became the apostle of “culture” in such works as Culture and Anarchy (1869.)

Born in Laleham, Middlesex, the eldest son of English educationalist and scholar Thomas Arnold of Rugby, Matthew Arnold was educated at Winchester, Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford. He won the Newdigate prize with a poem on Oliver Cromwell (1843,) and in 1845 was elected a Fellow of Oriel College. He was private secretary to Lord Lansdowne 1847–51 and then was appointed one of the lay inspectors of schools 1851–86, and professor of poetry at Oxford 1857–67.

Arnold was regularly sent by the government to probe into the state of education on the Continent, especially in France, Germany, and Holland, and his reports of English deficiencies attracted much attention in England, as did his application to the scripture of the methods of literary criticism. He made his mark with Poems: A New Edition (1853–54) and New Poems (1867.)

Arnold’s prose writings include On Translating Homer (1861,) Essays in Criticism (1865; 2nd ser., 1888,) and Culture and Anarchy (1869.) For his religious views, St Paul and Protestantism (1870,) Literature and Dogma (1873,) God and the Bible (1875,) and Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877) are of particular interest.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by 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

Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
Matthew Arnold
Topics: Secrets of Success

Mind is a light which the Gods mock us with To lead false those who trust it.
Matthew Arnold
Topics: Mind

They… who await
No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
Matthew Arnold
Topics: Fate

Journalism is literature in a hurry.
Matthew Arnold
Topics: Journalism, Journalists

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening…
Matthew Arnold
Topics: City Life, Cities

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.
Matthew Arnold
Topics: Dreams

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
Matthew Arnold
Topics: Dying, Truth, Death

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things
Matthew Arnold
Topics: Poetry

They who await no gifts from chance have conquered fate.
Matthew Arnold
Topics: Luck, Fortune

Here is the element or power of conduct, of intellect and knowledge, of beauty, and of social life and manners, and all needful to build up a complete human life.—We have instincts responding to them all, and requiring them all, and we are perfectly civilized only when all these instincts of our nature—all these elements in our civilization have been adequately recognized and satisfied.
Matthew Arnold
Topics: Civilization

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

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

Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
Matthew Arnold
Topics: Culture

Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
Matthew Arnold
Topics: Culture, Perfection

Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.
Matthew Arnold
Topics: Morals

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

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

With close-lipped Patience for our only friend, Sad Patience, too near neighbor to Despair.
Matthew Arnold
Topics: Patience

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

Men of culture are the true apostles of equality.
Matthew Arnold
Topics: Culture

Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.
Matthew Arnold

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

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

Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.
Matthew Arnold
Topics: Hope

Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one.
Matthew Arnold
Topics: Culture

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

Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.
Matthew Arnold
Topics: Ideas

Experience—making all futures, fruits of all the pasts.
Matthew Arnold
Topics: Experience

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

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