Matthew Arnold Quotes

239 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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
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
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
Time may restore us in his course
Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force;
But where will Europe's latter hour
Again find Wordsworth's healing power?

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

Matthew Arnold
Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we,
Light half-believers of our casual creeds,
Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will'd,
Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,
Whose vague resolves never have been fulfill'd;
For whom each year we see
Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new;
Who hesitate and falter life away,
And lose tomorrow the ground won today—
Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too?

Matthew Arnold
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.

Matthew Arnold
The American Philistine was a livelier sort of Philistine than ours.

Matthew Arnold
How many minds — almost all the great ones — were formed in secrecy and solitude!

Matthew Arnold
Burke is so great because, almost alone in England, he brings thought to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought.

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
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.

Matthew Arnold
Therefore to thee it was given
Many to save with thyself;
And, at the end of thy day,
O faithful shepherd! to come,
Bringing thy sheep in thy hand.

Matthew Arnold
On one she smiled, and he was blest;
She smiles elsewhere — we make a din!
But 'twas not love which heaved her breast,
Fair child! — it was the bliss within.

Matthew Arnold
Hark! ah, the Nightingale!
The tawny-throated!
Hark! from that moonlit cedar what a burst!
What triumph! hark—what pain!

Matthew Arnold
Terms like grace, new birth, justification…terms, in short, which with St Paul are literary terms, theologians have employed as if they were scientific terms.

Matthew Arnold
So, loath to suffer mute.
We, peopling the void air,
Make Gods to whom to impute
The ills we ought to bear.

Matthew Arnold
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.

Matthew Arnold
With aching hands and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day, and wish 'twere done.
Not till the hours of light return,
All we have built do we discern.

Matthew Arnold
No, no! The energy of life may be
Kept on after the grave, but not begun;
And he who flagg'd not in the earthly strife,
From strength to strength advancing — only he
His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,
Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.

Matthew Arnold
The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.

Matthew Arnold
Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn
Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?

Matthew Arnold
Ennobling this dull pomp, the life of kings,
By contemplation of diviner things.

Matthew Arnold
Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye
Forever doth accompany mankind,
Hath look'd on no religion scornfully
That men did ever find.

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

Matthew Arnold