Matthew Arnold Quotes

239 Sourced Quotes

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

Matthew Arnold
For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire,
Showed me the high, white star of Truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.

Matthew Arnold
But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.

Matthew Arnold
Come, dear children, let us away;
Down and away below.
Now my brothers call from the bay;
Now the great winds shoreward blow;
Now the salt tides seaward flow;
Now the wild white horses play,
Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
Children dear, let us away.
This way, this way!

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

Matthew Arnold
Her cabined ample Spirit,
It fluttered and failed for breath.
To-night it doth inherit
The vasty hall of death.

Matthew Arnold
The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.

Matthew Arnold
There is the world of ideas and there is the world of practice; the French are often for suppressing the one and the English the other; but neither is to be suppressed.

Matthew Arnold
Fate gave, what Chance shall not control,
His sad lucidity of soul.

Matthew Arnold
Peace, peace is what I seek and public calm,
Endless extinction of unhappy hates.

Matthew Arnold
Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again.

Matthew Arnold
The highest reach of science is, one may say, an inventive power, a faculty of divination, akin to the highest power exercised in poetry.

Matthew Arnold
And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and hustle by; And never once possess our soul Before we die.

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

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
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
For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.

Matthew Arnold
Protestantism has the method of Jesus with His secret too much left out of mind; Catholicism has His secret with His method too much left out of mind; neither has His unerring balance, His intuition, His sweet reasonableness. But both have hold of a great truth, and get from it a great power.

Matthew Arnold
At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.

Matthew Arnold
The nice sense of measure is certainly not one of Nature's gifts to her English children... we have all of us yielded to infatuation at some moment of our lives.

Matthew Arnold
Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.

Matthew Arnold
For what wears out the life of mortal men? 'Tis that from change to change their being rolls; Tis that repeated shocks, again, again, Exhaust the energy of strongest souls And numb the elastic powers.

Matthew Arnold
Grey time-worn marbles Hold the pure Muses. In their cool gallery, By yellow Tiber, They still look fair.

Matthew Arnold
The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost ideas with Hebraism is conduct and obedience.Nothing can do away with this ineffaceable difference. The Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is, that they hinder right thinking; the Hebrew quarrel with them is, that they hinder right acting.

Matthew Arnold
It is not in the outward and visible world of material life that the Celtic genius of Wales or Ireland can at this day hope to count for much; it is in the inward world of thought and science.What it has been, what is has done, what it will be or will do, as a matter of modern politics.

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
Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power.

Matthew Arnold
Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.

Matthew Arnold
Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together, it suggests, however indirectly, high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the emotion so helpful in making principles operative.

Matthew Arnold
Nature's great law, and law of all men's minds? — To its own impulse every creature stirs; Live by thy light, and earth will live by hers!

Matthew Arnold