Top 180 Matthew Arnold Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.”

— Matthew Arnold

102. “All this I bear, for, what I seek, I know: Peace, peace is what I seek, and public calm: Endless extinction of unhappy hates.”

— Matthew Arnold

103. “Grey time-worn marbles Hold the pure Muses. In their cool gallery, By yellow Tiber, They still look fair.”

— Matthew Arnold

104. “Calm’s not life’s crown, though calm is well.”

— Matthew Arnold

105. “Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye Forever doth accompany mankind, Hath look’d on no religion scornfully That men did ever find.”

— Matthew Arnold

106. “Coldly, sadly descends The autumn evening. The Field Strewn with its dank yellow drifts Of wither’d leaves, and the elms, Fade into dimness apace, Silent; hardly a shout From a few boys late at their play!”

— Matthew Arnold

107. “Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again.”

— Matthew Arnold

108. “Now the great winds shoreward blow Now the salt tides seaward flow Now the wild white horses play Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.”

— Matthew Arnold

109. “On Sundays, at the matin-chime, The Alpine peasants, two and three, Climb up here to pray; Burghers and dames, at summer’s prime, Ride out to church from Chamberry, Dight with mantles gay, But else it is a lonely time Round the Church of Brou.”

— Matthew Arnold

110. “History – a vast Mississippi of falsehoods.”

— Matthew Arnold

111. “Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.”

— Matthew Arnold

112. “Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children of the light.”

— Matthew Arnold

113. “Truth illuminates and gives joy; and it is by the bond of joy, not of pleasure, that men’s spirits are indissolubly held.”

— Matthew Arnold

114. “The same heart beats in every human breast.”

— Matthew Arnold

115. “What is it to grow old? Is it to lose the glory of the form, The lustre of the eye? Is it for Beauty to forego her wreath? Yes; but not this alone.”

— Matthew Arnold

116. “Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one.”

— Matthew Arnold

117. “For eager teachers seized my youth, pruned my faith and trimmed my fire. Showed me the high, white star of truth, there bade me gaze and there aspire.”

— Matthew Arnold

118. “I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today.”

— Matthew Arnold

119. “Sanity – that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.”

— Matthew Arnold

120. “The free thinking of one age is the common sense of the next.”

— Matthew Arnold

121. “France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.”

— Matthew Arnold

122. “The strongest part of a religion today is its unconscious poetry.”

— Matthew Arnold

123. “He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the “Iliad” itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible.”

— Matthew Arnold

124. “Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.”

— Matthew Arnold

125. “Creep into thy narrow bed, Creep, and let no more be said!”

— Matthew Arnold

126. “Physician of the Iron Age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear – And struck his finger on the place, And said – Thou ailest here, and here.”

— Matthew Arnold

127. “Is it so small a thing To have enjoyed the sun...”

— Matthew Arnold

128. “Time, so complain’d of, Who to no one man Shows partiality, Brings round to all men Some undimm’d hours.”

— Matthew Arnold

129. “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

130. “Once read thy own breast right, And thou hast done with fears.”

— Matthew Arnold

131. “Not deep the poet sees, but wide.”

— Matthew Arnold

132. “On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.”

— Matthew Arnold

133. “No, no! The energy of life may be Kept on after the grave, but not begun; And he who flagg’d not in the earthly strife, From strength to strength advancing – only he His soul well-knit, and all his battles won, Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.”

— Matthew Arnold

134. “The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits;- on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.”

— Matthew Arnold

135. “Humid the air! Leafless, yet soft as spring. The tender purple spray on copse and briers! And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, she needs not June for beauty’s heightening. Lovely all the time she lies...”

— Matthew Arnold

136. “Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?”

— Matthew Arnold

137. “Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together, it suggests, however indirectly, high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the emotion so helpful in making principles operative.”

— Matthew Arnold

138. “One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class.”

— Matthew Arnold

139. “The “hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and, pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits,” this good fellow carried hidden in his nature, apparently, something destined to develop into a necessity for humane letters.”

— Matthew Arnold

140. “The sophist sneers: Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong! The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng! Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.”

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

142. “Dreams dawn and fly: friends smile and die, Like spring flowers. Our vaunted life is one long funeral. Men dig graves, with bitter tears, For their dead hopes; and all, Mazed with doubts, and sick with fears, Count the hours.”

— Matthew Arnold

143. “To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.”

— Matthew Arnold

144. “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

145. “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

146. “Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life.”

— Matthew Arnold

147. “Weep bitterly over the dead, for he is worthy, and then comfort thyself; drive heaviness away: thou shall not do him good, but hurt thyself.”

— Matthew Arnold

148. “To the Bible men will return; and why? Because they cannot do without it.”

— Matthew Arnold

149. “Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.”

— Matthew Arnold

150. “Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man taken by himself.”

— Matthew Arnold