Quotes from Matthew Arnold

Greatness is a spiritual condition.

Genius is mainly an affair of energy.

Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.

I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.

Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life.

Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well.

And we forget because we must and not because we will.

All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow, Find their sole voice in that victorious brow.

Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.

Saw life steadily and saw it whole.

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

It is so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done.

Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.

Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.

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

Time, so complain'd of, Who to no one man Shows partiality, Brings round to all men Some undimm'd hours.

Time may restore us in his course Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force: But where will Europe's latter hour Again find Wordsworth's healing power?

Six years-six little years-six drops of time.

ForTime, not Corydon, hath conquered thee.

Grey time-worn marbles Hold the pure Muses. In their cool gallery, By yellow Tiber, They still look fair.

Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.

But often, in the world's most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life; A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course; A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us—to know Whence our lives come and where they go.

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