Quotes by

Matthew Arnold

The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishmans 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. – Matthew Arnold

Tis not to see the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirred;
And weep, and feel the fullness of the past,
The years that are not more. – Matthew Arnold

Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances. – Matthew Arnold

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. – Matthew Arnold

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. – Matthew Arnold

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

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beautys heightening… – Matthew Arnold

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

With close-lipped Patience for our only friend, Sad Patience, too near neighbor to Despair. – Matthew Arnold

Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming. – Matthew Arnold

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 as we discern. – Matthew Arnold

But each day brings its petty dust our soon-choked souls to fill, and we forget because we must, and not because we will. – Matthew Arnold

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

Greatness is a spiritual condition. – 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

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair. – Matthew Arnold

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

Light half-believers of our casual creeds, who never deeply felt, nor clearly will d, whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds, whose vague resolves never have been fulfilled. – Matthew Arnold

People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is. Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style. – Matthew Arnold

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