Quotes from Matthew Arnold

What actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same; that which interests them is permanent and the same also.

Yet they, believe me, who await No gifts from Chance, have conquer'd Fate.

Lack of recent information is responsible for more mistakes of judgment than erroneous reasoning.

When Byron's eyes were shut in death, We bow'd our head and held our breath. He taught us little: but our soul Had felt him like the thunder's roll.

The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.

Dreams dawn and fly: friends smile and die, Like spring flowers. Our vaunted life is one long funeral. Men dig graves, with bitter tears, For their dead hopes; and all, Mazed with doubts, and sick with fears, Count the hours.

Miracles do not happen.

Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.

Such a price The Gods exact for song; To become what we sing.

Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man taken by himself.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and wisely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.

For rigorous teachers seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire, Show'd me the high white star of Truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire.

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

The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.

That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.

On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.

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

The same heart beats in every human breast.

Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.

We count the hours: these dreams of ours, false and hollow, Shall we go hence and find they are not dead?

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

Physician of the Iron Age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear -- And struck his finger on the place, And said -- Thou ailest here, and here.

Is it so small a thing To have enjoy'd the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done.

The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.