Quotes from Matthew Arnold

We, peopling the void air, Make Gods to whom to impute The ills we ought to bear; With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily.

For science, God is simply the stream of tendency by which all things seek to fulfill the law of their being.

France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.

How many minds--almost all the great ones--were formed in secrecy and solitude!

Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.

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.

History - a vast Mississippi of falsehoods

Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.

Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.

The will is free; 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!

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.

The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.

The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye Forever doth accompany mankind, Hath look'd on no religion scornfully That men did ever find.

Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.

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

The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as they are.

All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming

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

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

English civilization the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society that is what interests me.