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Matthew Arnold Quotes
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Ennobling this dull pomp, the life of kings,
By contemplation of diviner things.
Matthew Arnold
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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
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Ere the parting hour go by,
Quick, thy tablets, Memory!
Matthew Arnold
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Philistinism!—We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.
Matthew Arnold
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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So, loath to suffer mute.
We, peopling the void air,
Make Gods to whom to impute
The ills we ought to bear.
Matthew Arnold
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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
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Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn
Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
Matthew Arnold
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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.
Matthew Arnold
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Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius; therefore a nation whose spirit is characterized by energy may well be imminent in poetry - and we have Shakespeare.
Matthew Arnold
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Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is ready.
Matthew Arnold
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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.
Matthew Arnold
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Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends; Nature and man can never be fast friends.
Matthew Arnold
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Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
Matthew Arnold
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A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time.
Matthew Arnold
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Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.
Matthew Arnold
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Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, Soon will the musk carnations break and swell.
Matthew Arnold
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Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life.
Matthew Arnold
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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 his like a thunder roll.... We watch'd the fount of fiery life Which serv'd for that Titanic life.
Matthew Arnold
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But thou, my son, study to make prevail One colour in thy life, the hue of truth.
Matthew Arnold
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If Paris that brief flight allow, My humble tomb explore! It bears: Eternity, be thou My refuge! and no more.
Matthew Arnold
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Matthew Arnold
Creative Commons
Born:
December 24, 1822
Died:
April 15, 1888
(aged 65)
Bio:
Matthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools.
Known for:
Dover Beach (1867)
Culture and Anarchy (1869)
Matthew Arnold's essays in criticism (1865)
Study of Poetry
Most used words:
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man
poetry
power
light
heart
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culture
thought
day
true
night
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Matthew Arnold on Wikipedia
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Matthew Arnold works on Wikisource
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