Quotes from Matthew Arnold

Like driftwood spares which meet and pass Upon the boundless ocean-plain, So on the sea of life, alas! Man nears man, meets, and leaves again.

If there ever comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a force such as the world has never known.

Man errs not that he deems His welfare his true aim, He errs because he dreams The world does but exist that welfare to bestow.

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.

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

The need of expansion is as genuine an instinct in man as the need in a plant for the light, or the need in man himself for going upright. The love of liberty is simply the instinct in man for expansion.

Who hesitate and falter life away and lose tomorrow the ground won today.

One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common--discontent.

Art still has truth. Take refuge there.

Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.

What is it to grow old? Is it to lose the glory of the form, The lustre of the eye? Is it for Beauty to forego her wreath? Yes; but not this alone.

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

Resolve to find thyself; and to know that he who finds himself, loses his misery

To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.

We do not what we ought; What we ought not, we do; And lean upon the thought That chance will bring us through; But our own acts, for good or ill, are mightier powers.

Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again.

Spare me the whispering, crowded room, the friends who come and gape and go, the ceremonious air of gloom - all, which makes death a hideous show.

I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture.

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

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

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

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

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

Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one.