Famous Matthew Arnold Quotations

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"The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light."
by Matthew Arnold
"Truth sits upon the lips of dying men."
by Matthew Arnold
"...what thwarts us and demands of us the greatest effort is also what can teach us most."
by Matthew Arnold
"But each day brings its petty dust Our soon-chok'd souls to fill, And we forget because we must, And not because we will."
by Matthew Arnold
"I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today."
by Matthew Arnold
"It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence."
by Matthew Arnold
"It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking at it that one overcomes it but, rather, often by working on the one next to it. Certain people and certain things require to be approached on an angle."
by Matthew Arnold
"Journalism is literature in a hurry"
by Matthew Arnold
"Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he Who finds himself, loses his misery."
by Matthew Arnold
"Resolve to be thyself and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery."
by Matthew Arnold
"The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next."
by Matthew Arnold
"The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion."
by Matthew Arnold
"Truth sits upon the lips of dying men"
by Matthew Arnold
"Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all."
by 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."
by Matthew Arnold
"Cruel, but composed and bland, Dumb, inscrutable and grand, So Tiberius might have sat, Had Tiberius been a cat."
by Matthew Arnold
"And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty's heightening..."
by 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."
by Matthew Arnold
"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."
by Matthew Arnold
"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."
by 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."
by 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."
by Matthew Arnold
"Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming."
by Matthew Arnold
"Greatness is a spiritual condition."
by 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."
by Matthew Arnold
"Journalism is literature in a hurry."
by Matthew Arnold
"Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur."
by 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."
by Matthew Arnold
"This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims."
by Matthew Arnold
"'Tis not to see the world As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes, And heart profoundly stirred; And weep, and feel the fullness of the past, The years that are not more."
by Matthew Arnold
"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."
by Matthew Arnold
"'Fenced early in this cloistral round Of reverie, of shade, of prayer,..."
by Matthew Arnold
"But—if you cannot give us ease— Last of the race of them who grieve..."
by Matthew Arnold
"Eternal passion! Eternal pain!"
by Matthew Arnold
"Her cabined, ample spirit, It fluttered and failed for breath. Tonight it doth inherit The vasty hall of death."
by Matthew Arnold
"—No, no thou hast not felt the lapse of hours! For what wears out the life of mortal men?..."
by Matthew Arnold
"Once pass'd I blindfold here, at any hour, Now seldom come I, since I came with him...."
by Matthew Arnold
"O life unlike to ours! Who fluctuate idly without term or scope,..."
by Matthew Arnold
"One moment, on the rapid's top, our boat Hung poised —and then the darting river of Life..."
by Matthew Arnold
"Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did too!"
by Matthew Arnold
"Still doth the soul, from its lone fastness high, Upon our life a ruling effluence send...."
by Matthew Arnold
"The sea is calm to-night. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits;—"
by Matthew Arnold


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