Matthew Arnold quotes:

Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.

Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

On Sundays, at the matin-chime, The Alpine peasants, two and three, Climb up here to pray; Burghers and dames, at summer's prime, Ride out to church from Chamberry, Dight with mantles gay, But else it is a lonely time Round the Church of Brou.

Eutrapelia . "A happy and gracious flexibility," Pericles calls this quality of the Athenians...lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice and freedom from stiffness, openness of mind, amiability of manners.

Spare me the whispering, crowded room, the friends who come and gape and go, the ceremonious air of gloom - all, which makes death a hideous show.

Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

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.

The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.

Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.

There is no better motto which it [culture] can have than these words of Bishop Wilson, "To make reason and the will of God prevail."

Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.

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

Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, Soon will the musk carnations break and swell.

Coldly, sadly descends The autumn evening. The Field Strewn with its dank yellow drifts Of wither'd leaves, and the elms, Fade into dimness apace, Silent; hardly a shout From a few boys late at their play!

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

Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.

The will is free; Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful; The seeds of godlike power are in us still; Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will!

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.

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

To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.

Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.

Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.

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

Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.

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.

The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.

And we forget because we must and not because we will.

Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.

For rigorous teachers seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire, Show'd me the high, white star of Truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire. Even now their whispers pierce the gloom: What dost thou in this living tomb?"

Like driftwood spares which meet and pass Upon the boundless ocean-plain, So on the sea of life, alas! Man nears man, meets, and leaves again.

I am bound by my own definition of criticism : a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.

Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.

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

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.

Weep bitterly over the dead, for he is worthy, and then comfort thyself; drive heaviness away: thou shall not do him good, but hurt thyself.

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

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.

He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the "Iliad" itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

Hither and thither spins The wind-borne mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole.

This strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims.

Most men eddy about Here and there-eat and drink, Chatter and love and hate, Gather and squander, are raised Aloft, are hurled in the dust, Striving blindly, achieving Nothing; and then they die- Perish;-and no one asks Who or what they have been.

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

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.

Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born.

Thought and science follow their own law of development; they are slowly elaborated in the growth and forward pressure of humanity, in what Shakespeare calls ...The prophetic soul, Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.

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.

Once read thy own breast right, And thou hast done with fears.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.... He who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and the will of God prevail.

Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, Where the winds are all asleep; Where the spent lights quiver and gleam; Where the salt weed sways in the stream.

This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims

The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies fairUpon the straits;- on the French coast the lightGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,But often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life;A thirst to spend our fire and restless forceIn tracking out our true, original course.

For rigorous teachers seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire, Show'd me the high, white star of Truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire. Even now their whispers pierce the gloom: What dost thou in this living tomb?

Waiting from heaven for the spark to fall.

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.

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.

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

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty's heightening...

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.

Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.

The Greek word euphuia, a finely tempered nature, gives exactly the notion of perfection as culture brings us to perceive it; a harmonious perfection, a perfection in which the characters of beauty and intelligence are both present, which unites "the two noblest of things"--as Swift . . . most happily calls them in his Battle of the Books, "the two noblest of things, sweetness and light.

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'ertax'd, its palsied hearts, was rife.

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay ... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.

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

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.

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?

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

Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did too!

Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.

Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.

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

Ah love, let us be true to one another, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams; so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy nor love nor life.

Ah! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.

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.

Ah, love, let us be true To one another!

Alas! is even love too weak To unlock the heart, and let it speak?

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!

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

All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow, Find their sole voice in that victorious brow.

All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.

All the live murmur of a summer's day.

All this I bear, for, what I seek, I know: Peace, peace is what I seek, and public calm: Endless extinction of unhappy hates.

And amongst us one, Who most has suffer'd, takes dejectedly His seat upon the intellectual throne.

And as long as the world lasts, all who want to make progress in righteousness will come to Israel for inspiration, as to the people who have had the sense for righteousness most glowing and strongest; and in hearing and reading the words Israel has uttered for us, carers for conduct will find a glow and a force they could find nowhere else.

And each day brings it's pretty dust, Our soon-choked souls to fll And we forget because we must, And not because we will.

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!

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

And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, / Self-schooled, self-scanned, self-honoured, self-secure / Didst tread on earth unguessed at. Better so!.

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.

Art still has truth. Take refuge there.

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.

Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.

But so many books thou readest, But so many schemes thou breedest, But so many wishes feedest, That thy poor head almost turns.

But the idea of science and systematic knowledge is wanting to our whole instruction alike, and not only to that of our business class ... In nothing do England and the Continent at the present moment more strikingly differ than in the prominence which is now given to the idea of science there, and the neglect in which this idea still lies here; a neglect so great that we hardly even know the use of the word science in its strict sense, and only employ it in a secondary and incorrect sense.

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

But thou, my son, study to make prevail One colour in thy life, the hue of truth.

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! The will to neither strive nor cry, The power to feel what others give! Calm, calm me more! nor let me die Before I have begun to live.

Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well.

Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.

Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.

Come to me in my dreams, and then By day I shall be well again. For then the night will more than pay The hopeless longing of the day.

Come, dear children, let us away; Down and away below!

Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?

Creep into thy narrow bed, Creep, and let no more be said!

Cruel, but composed and bland, Dumb, inscrutable and grand, So Tiberius might have sat, Had Tiberius been a cat.

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.

Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one

Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world