Quotes by Matthew Arnold

Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
– Matthew Arnold
Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.
– Matthew Arnold
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
Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.
– Matthew Arnold
Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
– Matthew Arnold
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
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
Greatness is a spiritual condition.
– Matthew Arnold
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
– Matthew Arnold
It is so small a think to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done.
– Matthew Arnold
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
– Matthew Arnold
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
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
Protestantism has the method of Jesus with His secret too much left out of mind; Catholicism has His secret with His method too much left out of mind; neither has His unerring balance, His intuition, His sweet reasonableness. But both have hold of a great truth, and get from it a great power.
– Matthew Arnold
Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.
– Matthew Arnold
The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
– Matthew Arnold
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
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
– Matthew Arnold
The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
– Matthew Arnold
The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.
– Matthew Arnold
This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.
– Matthew Arnold
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
– Matthew Arnold
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
With close-lipped Patience for our only friend, Sad Patience, too near neighbor to Despair.
– Matthew Arnold
Resolve to be thyself: and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
– Matthew Arnold
Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.
– Matthew Arnold
To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
– Matthew Arnold
Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.
– Matthew Arnold
Poetry a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.
– Matthew Arnold