Quotes from Matthew Arnold

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

Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.

Men of culture are the true apostles of equality

The sophist sneers: Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong! The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng! Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.

It is - last stage of all When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man

Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.

Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.

All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.

I knew the mass of men conceal'd Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd They would by other men be met With blank indifference.

Style ... is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.

To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.

Was Christ a man like us?-Ah! let us try If we then, too, can be such men as he!

To the Bible men will return; and why? Because they cannot do without it.

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

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

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

The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.

Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

Weary of myself, and sick of asking What I am, and what I ought to be, At this vessel's prow I stand, which bears me Forwards, forwards, o'er the starlit sea.

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

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.

There is no better motto which it [culture] can have than these words of Bishop Wilson, "To make reason and the will of God prevail."

To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.... He who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and the will of God prevail.