Quotes from Matthew Arnold

Still nursing the unconquerable hope,Still clutching the inviolable shade.

Others abide our question. Thou art free.We ask and ask: Thou smilest and art still,Out-topping knowledge.

Yes, in the sea of life enisled,With echoing straits between us thrown,Dotting the shoreless watery wild,We mortal millions live alone.

Oh, born in days when wits were fresh and clear,And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;Before this strange disease of modern life,With its sick hurry, its divided aims,Its heads o'ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife.

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

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

Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; 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.

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

Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful:The seeds of godlike power are in us still:Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will.

We cannot kindle when we willThe fire that in the heart resides,The spirit bloweth and is still,In mystery our soul abides.

But often in the world's most crowded streets,But often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life.

Listen! you hear the grating roarOf pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,At their return, up the high strand,Begin, and cease, and then again begin,With tremulous cadence slow, and bringThe eternal note of sadness in.

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

Is it so small a thingTo have enjoyed the sun,To have lived light in the spring,To have loved, to have thought, to have done;To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes?

He who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and the will of God prevail.

Strew on her roses, roses,And never a spray of yew!In quiet she reposes;Ah, would that I did too!

I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.

Let the long contention cease!Geese are swans, and swans are geese.

Cruel, but composed and bland,Dumb, inscrutable and grand,So Tiberius might have sat,Had Tiberius been a cat.

Where great whales come sailing by,Sail and sail, with unshut eye,Round the world forever and aye.

Come, dear children, let us away;Down and away below!Now my brothers call from the bay,Now the great winds shoreward blow,Now the salt tides seaward flow;Now the wild white horses play,Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.

That sweet city [Oxford] with her dreaming spires.

Her cabined, ample spiritIt fluttered and failed for breath.Tonight it doth inheritThe vasty hall of death.