Matthew Arnold - Man Quotes

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It is — last stage of all —
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.

Matthew Arnold
Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more,
And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood;
Nature is stubborn, man would fain adore.

Matthew Arnold
Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets by expressing, with magical felicity, the physiognomy and movements of the outward world; and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man's moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretative both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity.

Matthew Arnold
Man errs not that he deems His welfare his true aim, He errs because he dreams The world does but exist that welfare to bestow.

Matthew Arnold
The interpretations of science do not give us this intimate sense of objects as the interpretations of poetry give it; they appeal to a limited faculty, and not to the whole man. It is not Linnaeus or Cavendish or Cuvier who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, who seizes their secret for us, who makes us participate in their life; it is Shakspeare [sic] … Wordsworth … Keats … Chateaubriand … Senancour.

Matthew Arnold
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
Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends; Nature and man can never be fast friends.

Matthew Arnold
Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.

Matthew Arnold
A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time.

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
Had Shakspeare and Milton lived in the atmosphere of modern feeling, had they had the multitude of new thoughts and feelings to deal with a modern has, I think it likely the style of each would have been far less curious and exquisite. For in a man style is the saying in the best way what you have to say. The what you have to say depends on your age. In the 17th century it was a smaller harvest than now, and sooner to be reaped; and therefore to its reaper was left time to stow it more finely and curiously. Still more was this the case in the ancient world. The poet's matter being the hitherto experience of the world, and his own, increases with every century.

Matthew Arnold
Style…is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.

Matthew Arnold
The Sophist Sneers: Fool, take
Thy pleasure, right or wrong!
The Pious Wail: Forsake
A world these sophists throng!
Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.

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

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

Matthew Arnold
Who prop, thou ask'st in these bad days, my mind?'
He much, the old man, who, clearest-souled of men,
Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen,
And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though blind.

Matthew Arnold
One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it.

Matthew Arnold
Calm soul of all things! make it mine
To feel, amid the city's jar,
That there abides a peace of thine,
Man did not make, and cannot mar.

Matthew Arnold
For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.

Matthew Arnold
All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.

Matthew Arnold
Youth dreams a bliss on this side death.
It dreams a rest, if not more deep,
More grateful than this marble sleep;
It hears a voice within it tell:
Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well.
'Tis all perhaps which man acquires,
But 'tis not what our youth desires.

Matthew Arnold
Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself.

Matthew Arnold