Quotes from Matthew Arnold

Humid the air! Leafless, yet soft as spring. The tender purple spray on copse and briers! And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, she needs not June for beauty's heightening. Lovely all the time she lies...

We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.

Society may be imagined so uniform that one education shall be suitable for all its members; we have not a society of that kind, nor has any European country.

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

Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.

Culture . . . seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light...

Culture is the most resolute enemy of anarchy, because of the great hopes and designs for the State which culture teaches us to nourish.

The man who to untimely death is doomed Vainly would hedge him in from the assault of harm; He bears the seed of ruin in himself.

Hebraism and Hellenism,??between these two points of influence moves our world. At one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time of the other; and it ought to be, though it never is, evenly and happily balanced between them. The final aim of both Hellenism and Hebraism, as of all great spiritual disciplines, is no doubt the same: man's perfection or salvation.

Venid a mí en mis sueños, y luego durante el día estaré bien otra vez. Porque entonces la noche más que pagará el anhelo desesperado del día.

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

No, thou art come too late, Empedocles! And the world hath the day, and must break thee, Not thou the world. With men thou canst not live, Their thoughts, their ways, their wishes, are not thine; And being lonely thou art miserable, For something has impair'd they spirit's strength, And dried its self-sufficing font of joy.

Tis the gradual furnace of the world, In whose hot air poor spirits are upcurl'd Until they crumple, or else grow like steel- Which kills in us the bloom, the youth, the spring- Which leaves the fierce necessity to feel, But takes away the power- this can avail, By drying up our joy in everything, To make our former pleasures all seem stale. - Tristram and Iseult

Come to me in my dreams, and then By day I shall be well again. For then the night will more than pay The hopeless longing of the day.

And they see, for a moment, Stretching out, like the desert In its weary, unprofitable length, Their faded ignoble lives. While the locks are yet brown on thy head, While the soul still looks through thine eyes, While the heart still pours The mantling blood to thy cheek, Sink, O Youth, in thy soul! Yearn to the greatness of Nature! Rally the good in the depths of thyself.

The State is of the religion of all its citizens without the fanaticism of any of them.

Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends; Nature and man can never be fast friends. Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave!

The wheels of life Stand never idle, but go always round. - To the Duke of Wellington

Is it so small a thing To have enjoy'd the sun, To have liv'd light in the spring, To have lov'd, to have thought, to have done; To have advanc'd true friends, and beat down baffling foes; That we must feign a bliss Of doubtful future date, And while we dream on this Lose our present state, And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose? Empedocles on Etna: Act I, Scene II

One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class

Socrates has drunk his hemlock and is dead; but in his own breast does not every man carry about with him a possible Socrates, in that power of a disinterested play of consciousness upon his stock notions and habits, of which this wise and admirable man gave all through his lifetime the great example, and which was the secret of his incomparable influence?

Tis not the times, 'Tis not the Sophists vex him: There is some root of suffering in himself, Some secret and unfollow'd vein of woe, Which makes the times look black and sad to him. Empedocles on Etna: Act I, Scene I

Let me go back for a moment to Bishop Wilson, who says:??'First, never go against the best light you have; secondly, take care that your light be not darkness.

In mystery our soul abides.