Quotes By Matthew Arnold

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.

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.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.

Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

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

Greatness is a spiritual condition.

And we forget because we must and not because we will.

Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.

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.

Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.

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

Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.

It is so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done.

Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.

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

Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

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

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.

The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

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

Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.