Matthew Arnold Quotes (162 Quotes)

Millions, whose life in ice lay fast,
Have thoughts, and smiles, and tears.

Children dear, was it yesterday (Call yet once) that she went away

Let Sohrab arm, and we will find a man.

A wanderer is man from his birth.

Wandering between two worlds,one dead, The other powerless to be born.

Thou waitest for the spark from heaven!

With hope extinct and brow composed
I mark'd the present die;
Its term of life was nearly closed,
Yet it had more than I.

He spoke, and loosd our heart in tears. He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth.

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.

But the majestic river floated on, Out of the mist and hum of that low land, Into the frosty starlight, and there moved, Rejoicing, through the hushed Chorasmian waste, Under the solitary moon.

The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I.

And then he thinks he knows; The hills where his life rose, And the sea where it goes.

But, since life teems with ill,
Nurse no extravagant hope.

Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.

The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this their poetry is conceived in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.

Gray, a born poet, fell upon an age of reason.

Tired of knocking at Preferment's door.

And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and hustle by And never once possess our soul Before we die.

When we first saw the news of the bombing we didn't know he was out there in Bali,

Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.

Come away, children, call no more!

For what wears out the life of mortal men?

Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power.

Roam on The light we sought is shining still. Dost thou ask proof Our tree yet crowns the hill, Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside.

Philistine gives the notion of something particularly stiff-necked and perverse in the resistance to light and its children and therein it specially suits our middle-class.

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, Self-schooled, self-scanned, self-honoured, self-secure; Didst tread on earth unguessed at. Better so.

I will unfold my sentence and my crime.

Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.

The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.

Still standing for some false impossible shore.

From whose floor the new-bathed stars; Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.

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.

Creep into thy narrow bed, Creep, and let no more be said

He bears the seed of ruin in himself.

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.

Thou lovest it, then, my wine?

Composed to bear, I lived and died,
And knew my life was vain.

Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go Soon will the high midsummer pomps come on.

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.

For him the present
Holds only pain.

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

Spare me the whispering, crowded room, the friends who come and gape and go, the ceremonious air of gloom - all, which makes death a hideous show.

He knows, says Hebraism, his Biblewhenever we hear this said, we may, without any elaborate defense of culture, content ourselves with answering simply No man, who knows nothing else, knows even his Bible.

Forgive me, masters of the mind!

And I lose my poor soul, Merman!

The kings of modern thought are dumb.

This strange disease of modern life.

France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.

Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again.