Top 180 Matthew Arnold Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Ah! two desires toss about The poet’s feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.”

— Matthew Arnold

52. “Six years-six little years-six drops of time.”

— Matthew Arnold

53. “ForTime, not Corydon, hath conquered thee.”

— Matthew Arnold

54. “One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common – discontent.”

— Matthew Arnold

55. “Philistinism! – We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.”

— Matthew Arnold

56. “However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications.”

— Matthew Arnold

57. “He spoke, and loos’d our heart in tears. He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth.”

— Matthew Arnold

58. “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.”

— Matthew Arnold

59. “I knew the mass of men conceal’d Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal’d They would by other men be met With blank indifference.”

— Matthew Arnold

60. “I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.”

— Matthew Arnold

61. “Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.”

— Matthew Arnold

62. “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

63. “Cutlure looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, – the passion for sweetness and light.”

— Matthew Arnold

64. “Indeed there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one’s mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry.”

— Matthew Arnold

65. “The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness ; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience .”

— Matthew Arnold

66. “O strong soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? For that force, Surely, has not been left vain!”

— Matthew Arnold

67. “Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, Where the winds are all asleep; Where the spent lights quiver and gleam; Where the salt weed sways in the stream.”

— Matthew Arnold

68. “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.”

— Matthew Arnold

69. “Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is ready.”

— Matthew Arnold

70. “Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius; therefore a nation whose spirit is characterized by energy may well be imminent in poetry – and we have Shakespeare.”

— Matthew Arnold

71. “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.”

— Matthew Arnold

72. “The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I.”

— Matthew Arnold

73. “To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.”

— Matthew Arnold

74. “Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye.”

— Matthew Arnold

75. “Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.”

— Matthew Arnold

76. “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.”

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

78. “Culture is the endeavour to know the best and to make this knowledge prevail for the good of all humankind.”

— Matthew Arnold

79. “Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!”

— Matthew Arnold

80. “A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time.”

— Matthew Arnold

81. “Most men in a brazen prison live, Where, in the sun’s hot eye, With heads bent o’er their toil, they languidly Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give, Dreaming of nought beyond their prison-wall.”

— Matthew Arnold

82. “Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, Soon will the musk carnations break and swell.”

— Matthew Arnold

83. “Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did too!”

— Matthew Arnold

84. “Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.”

— Matthew Arnold

85. “The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman’s 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

86. “The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.”

— Matthew Arnold

87. “But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.”

— Matthew Arnold

88. “Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.”

— Matthew Arnold

89. “The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.”

— Matthew Arnold

90. “Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.”

— Matthew Arnold

91. “Time may restore us in his course Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force: But where will Europe’s latter hour Again find Wordsworth’s healing power?”

— Matthew Arnold

92. “The will is free; Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful; The seeds of godlike power are in us still; Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will!”

— Matthew Arnold

93. “Alas! is even love too weak To unlock the heart, and let it speak?”

— Matthew Arnold

94. “The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.”

— Matthew Arnold

95. “Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron ’s struggle cease.”

— Matthew Arnold

96. “Come, dear children, let us away; Down and away below!”

— Matthew Arnold

97. “And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well – but ’tis not true!”

— Matthew Arnold

98. “For science, God is simply the stream of tendency by which all things seek to fulfill the law of their being.”

— Matthew Arnold

99. “Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.”

— Matthew Arnold

100. “Ah love, let us be true to one another, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams; so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy nor love nor life.”

— Matthew Arnold