Quotes from Matthew Arnold

And amongst us one,Who most has suffered, takes dejectedlyHis seat upon the intellectual throne.

Whispering from her towers [Oxford] the last enchantments of the Middle Age…. Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

Calm Soul of all things! make it mineTo feel, amid the city's jar,That there abides a peace of thine,Man did not make, and can not mar.

Sophocles long agoHeard it on the Aegean.

Yet they, believe me, who awaitNo gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.

Fate gave, what Chance shall not control,His sad lucidity of soul.

Yes, thou art gone! and round me too the nightIn ever-nearing circle weaves her shade.

Hither and thither spinsThe windborne, mirroring soul;A thousand glimpses wins,And never sees a whole.

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

The critical power… tends, at last, to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself… to make the best ideas prevail.

Charge once more, then, and be dumb!Let the victors, when they come,When the forts of folly fall,Find thy body by the wall.

Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.

Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.

Go, for they call you, Shepherd, from the hill.

Are ye too changed, ye hills?See, 'tis no foot of unfamiliar menTonight from Oxford up your pathway strays!Here came I often, often, in old days—Thyrsis [Arthur Hugh Clough] and I; we still had Thyrsis then.

Inequality… has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

Sanity—that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.

This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.

The power of the Latin classic is in character, that of the Greek is in beauty. Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.

Be his [Sophocles']My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul,From first youth tested up to extreme old age,Business could not make dull, nor passion wild:Who saw life steadily and saw it whole.

And long we try in vain to speak and actOur hidden self, and what we say and doIs eloquent, is well—but 'tis not true!

So, loath to suffer mute,We, peopling the void air,Make Gods to whom to imputeThe ills we ought to bear.

We do not what we ought;What we ought not, we do;And lean upon the thoughtThat chance will bring us through.