Matthew Arnold Quotes

239 Sourced Quotes

The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

Matthew Arnold
Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

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

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

Matthew Arnold
His expression may often be called bald…but it is bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.

Matthew Arnold
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. He who works for sweetness and light, works to make reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.

Matthew Arnold
Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!…whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age…Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
Of Oxford

Matthew Arnold
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 [Arthur Hugh Clough] and I; we still had Thyrsis then.

Matthew Arnold
The averagely sensual man whose natural home is France and in particular the city of Paris, and whose ideal is the free, gay, pleasant life you can have in Paris.

Matthew Arnold
For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.

Matthew Arnold
Nature, with equal mind,
Sees all her sons at play
Sees man control the wind,
The wind sweep man away.

Matthew Arnold
The imitators of Shakespeare, fixing their attention on his wonderful power of expression, have directed their imitation to this.

Matthew Arnold
On Sundays, at the matin-chime, The Alpine peasants, two and three, Climb up here to pray; Burghers and dames, at summer's prime, Ride out to church from Chamberry, Dight with mantles gay, But else it is a lonely time Round the Church of Brou.

Matthew Arnold
Why faintest thou! I wander'd 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.

Matthew Arnold
The will is free;
Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful;
The seeds of god-like power are in us still;
Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will!

Matthew Arnold
The signal-elm, that looks on Ilsley downs,
The Vale, the three lone weirs, the youthful Thames.

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

Matthew Arnold
I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.

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.

Matthew Arnold
But so many books thou readest, But so many schemes thou breedest, But so many wishes feedest, That thy poor head almost turns.

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

Matthew Arnold
For science, God is simply the stream of tendency by which all things seek to fulfill the law of their being.

Matthew Arnold
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.

Matthew Arnold
People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.

Matthew Arnold
If Paris that brief flight allow, My humble tomb explore! It bears: Eternity, be thou My refuge! and no more.

Matthew Arnold