Quotes from Matthew Arnold

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

The eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness.

Are ye too changed, ye hills? See, tis no foot of unfamiliar men> Tonight from Oxford up your pathway strays! Here came I often, often, in old days; Thyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then.

Still nursing the unconquerable hope, Still clutching the inviolable shade, With a free, onward impulse brushing through, By night, the silverd branches of the glade.

Men of culture are the true apostles of equality.

Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.

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

But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.

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

Her cabind, ample Spirit, It flutterd and faild for breath. To-night it doth inherit The vasty Hall of Death.

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

The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.

One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it.

Why faintest thou! I wanderd till I died. Roam on! The light we sought is shining still. Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill, Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside.

Is it so small a thing To have enjoyd the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done; To have advancd true friends, and beat down baffling foes?

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

The Celts certainly have it in a wonderful measure.

It is last stage of all When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves, To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.

With women the heart argues, not the mind.

Peace, peace is what I seek and public calm, Endless extinction of unhappy hates.

The kings of modern thought are dumb.

I am past thirty, and three parts iced over.

How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves! Again thou hearest? Eternal passion! Eternal pain!

To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.