Quotes by "Matthew Arnold"

Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done?

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

We forget because we must And not because we will.

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

Resolve to be thyself ... he who finds himself loses his misery!

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.

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

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