Matthew Arnold Quotes

239 Sourced Quotes

The World in which we live and move
Outlasts aversion, outlasts love:
Outlasts each effort, interest, hope,
Remorse, grief, joy.

Matthew Arnold
The power of the Latin classic is in character, that of the Greek is in beauty. Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.

Matthew Arnold
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold
Hear it, O Thyrsis, still our tree is there!—
Ah, vain! These English fields, this upland dim,
These brambles pale with mist engarlanded,
That lone, sky-pointing tree, are not for him;
To a boon southern country he is fled,
And now in happier air,
Wandering with the great Mother's train divine
(And purer or more subtle soul than thee,
I trow, the mighty Mother doth not see)
Within a folding of the Apennine.

Matthew Arnold
Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the children of the light.

Matthew Arnold
Weary of myself, and sick of asking What I am, and what I ought to be, At this vessel's prow I stand, which bears me Forwards, forwards, o'er the starlit sea.

Matthew Arnold
Now the great winds shorewards blow;
Now the salt tides seawards flow;
Now the wild white horses play,
Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.

Matthew Arnold
But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us, to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.

Matthew Arnold
And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,
Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure,
Didst tread on earth unguess'd at. — Better so! All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,
Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.

Matthew Arnold
Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows
Like the wave;
Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.
Love lends life a little grace,
A few sad smiles; and then,
Both are laid in one cold place,
In the grave.

Matthew Arnold
O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o'ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife—
Fly hence, our contact fear!

Matthew Arnold
Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.

Matthew Arnold
Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration.

Matthew Arnold
The Celts certainly have it [style] in a wonderful measure.

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

Matthew Arnold
What really dissatisfies in American civilization is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.

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
How fair a lot to fill
Is left to each man still.

Matthew Arnold
The day in its hotness,
The strife with the palm;
The night in her silence,
The stars in their calm.

Matthew Arnold
He went; his piping took a troubled sound
Of storms that rage outside our happy ground;
He could not wait their passing, he is dead!

Matthew Arnold
Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.

Matthew Arnold
The free-thinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

Matthew Arnold
The critical power... tends, at last, to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself... to make the best ideas prevail.

Matthew Arnold
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well — but 'tis not true!

Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Matthew Arnold
The day in his hotness,
The strife with the palm;
The night in her silence,
The stars in their calm.

Matthew Arnold
We, in some unknown Power's employ,
Move on a rigorous line;
Can neither, when we will, enjoy,
Nor, when we will, resign.

Matthew Arnold
Truth illuminates and gives joy; and it is by the band of joy, not of pleasure, that men's spirits are indissolubly held.

Matthew Arnold
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.

Matthew Arnold
Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men conceal'd
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
I knew they lived and moved
Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselves — and yet
The same heart beats in every human breast!

Matthew Arnold