Matthew Arnold
Birthdate: December 24, 1822
Birthplace: Laleham, Middlesex, England, United Kingdom
Date of Death: April 15, 1888
Occupation: Literary Critic and Poet
Profile: Best known for
Culture and Anarchy.
Website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Arnold
Number of Quotes: 38
A God, a God
their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.
To Marguerite: Continued
And we forget because we must and not because we will.
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.
Beneath all this he saw, and seeing, groaned and loathed,
The impotent revolt of life against life's doom.
Reflects Arnold's themes of existential struggle and melancholy.
Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well.
A meditation on the balance between peace and the vibrancy of life's struggles.
Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.
Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
Culture and Anarchy
Summarizing his view on cultural development.
Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
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.
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.
Dover Beach
A poignant reflection on disillusionment.
France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.
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.
He knows, he knows
That the world is a world of woes,
And that folly and sin
Play their game with the soul within.
A recurring theme in Arnold's
work, highlighting human frailty and moral challenges.
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
I am past thirty, and three parts iced over.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.
It is 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.
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
Life is not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming.
This encapsulates Arnold's belief in continuous self-improvement.
Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.
Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and
America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.
Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.
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.
Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.
The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
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.
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
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.
Dover Beach
Lamenting the decline of religious faith.
The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.
Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
Last on Earth
