Matthew Arnold
97 quotes
Biography
Matthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School, and brother of both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator.
"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."
"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;A longing to inquireInto the mystery of this heart which beatsSo wild, so deep in us—to knowWhence our lives come and where they go."
"I keep saying, Shakspeare, Shakspeare, you are as obscure as life is."
"Had Shakespeare 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."
"What actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same; that which interests them is permanent and the same also."
"I am past thirty, and three parts iced over."
"Sanity — that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power."
"How fair a lot to fill Is left to each man still."
"Their ineffectual feuds and feeble hates, Shadows of hates, but they distress them still."
"With women the heart argues, not the mind."
"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."
"It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think."
"Hath man no second life? — Pitch this one high!"
"Was Christ a man like us? — Ah! let us try If we then, too, can be such men as he!"
"The East bowed low before the blast, In patient deep disdain; She let the legions thunder past, And plunged in thought again."
"Nor bring, to see me cease to live, Some doctor full of phrase and fame, To shake his sapient head and give The ill he cannot cure a name."
"I will not say that thou wast true, Yet let me say that thou wast fair! And they that lovely face who view, They should not ask if truth be there."
"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."
"The Celts certainly have it in a wonderful measure."
"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."
"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."
"The free-thinking of one age is the common sense of the next."
"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."
"For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry."
"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."