Top 180 Matthew Arnold Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Journalism is literature in a hurry.”

— Matthew Arnold

2. “If there ever comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a force such as the world has never known.”

— Matthew Arnold

3. “Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming.”

— Matthew Arnold

4. “Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.”

— Matthew Arnold

5. “We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides, The spirit bloweth and is still, In mystery our soul abides: But tasks in hours of insight will’d Can be through hours of gloom fulfill’d.”

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

7. “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.”

— Matthew Arnold

8. “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.”

— Matthew Arnold

9. “We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I do not know.”

— Matthew Arnold

10. “Men of culture are the true apostles of equality.”

— Matthew Arnold

11. “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.”

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

13. “Art still has truth. Take refuge there.”

— Matthew Arnold

14. “Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.”

— Matthew Arnold

15. “Religion – that voice of the deepest human experience.”

— Matthew Arnold

16. “Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.”

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

18. “Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.”

— Matthew Arnold

19. “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.”

— Matthew Arnold

20. “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.”

— Matthew Arnold

21. “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.”

— Matthew Arnold

22. “Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power.”

— Matthew Arnold

23. “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.”

— Matthew Arnold

24. “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.”

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

26. “The heart less bounding at emotion new, The hope, once crushed, less quick to spring again.”

— Matthew Arnold

27. “I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture.”

— Matthew Arnold

28. “The kings of modern thought are dumb.”

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

30. “We do not what we ought; What we ought not, we do; And lean upon the thought That chance will bring us through; But our own acts, for good or ill, are mightier powers.”

— Matthew Arnold

31. “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.”

— Matthew Arnold

32. “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.”

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

36. “Saw life steadily and saw it whole.”

— Matthew Arnold

37. “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.”

— Matthew Arnold

38. “All the live murmur of a summer’s day.”

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

40. “Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain cradle in Pamere, A foiled circuitous wanderertill at last The longed-for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home of waters opens, bright And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.”

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

42. “Religion is ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling.”

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

44. “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

45. “For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.”

— Matthew Arnold

46. “Miracles do not happen.”

— Matthew Arnold

47. “Truth sits upon the lips of dying men, And falsehood, while I lived, was far from mine.”

— Matthew Arnold

48. “The eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness.”

— Matthew Arnold

49. “Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.”

— Matthew Arnold

50. “Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.”

— Matthew Arnold