Quotes from Matthew Arnold

Up the still, glistening beaches, Up the creeks we will hie, Over banks of bright seaweed The ebb-tide leaves dry. We will gaze, from the sand-hills, At the white, sleeping town; At the church on the hill-side— And then come back down. Singing: There dwells a loved one, But cruel is she! She left lonely for ever The kings of the sea. (from poem 'The Forsaken Merman')

Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

Ah, love, let us be true To one another!

Alas! is even love too weak To unlock the heart, and let it speak?

Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration.

If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.

But thou, my son, study to make prevail One colour in thy life, the hue of truth.

Truth illuminates and gives joy; and it is by the bond of joy, not of pleasure, that men's spirits are indissolubly held.

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men, And falsehood, while I lived, was far from mine.

For eager teachers seized my youth, pruned my faith and trimmed my fire. Showed me the high, white star of truth, there bade me gaze and there aspire.

Ah love, let us be true to one another, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams; so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy nor love nor life.

The nice sense of measure is certainly not one of Nature's gifts to her English children ... we have all of us yielded to infatuation at some moment of our lives.

Is it 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?

Resolve to be thyself; and know that who finds himself, loses his misery.

What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.

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.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.

We forget because we must And not because we will.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

The same heart beats in every human breast.

Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.

Resolve to be thyself ... he who finds himself loses his misery!

The pursuit of the perfect, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.

They who await no gifts from chance have conquered fate.