Top 180 Matthew Arnold Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.”

— Matthew Arnold

52. “Ah! two desires toss about The poet’s feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.”

— Matthew Arnold

53. “Nature’s great law, and the law of all men’s minds? To its own impulse every creature stirs: Live by thy light, and Earth will live by hers.”

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

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

— Matthew Arnold

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

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

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

69. “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

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

— Matthew Arnold

71. “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

72. “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

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

— Matthew Arnold

74. “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

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

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

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

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

83. “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

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

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

87. “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

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

— Matthew Arnold

89. “Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.”

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

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

93. “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

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

— Matthew Arnold

95. “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

96. “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

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

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold