Top 180 Matthew Arnold Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 4

151. “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

152. “All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.”

— Matthew Arnold

153. “For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.”

— Matthew Arnold

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

— Matthew Arnold

155. “What shelter to grow ripe is ours? What leisure to grow wise?”

— Matthew Arnold

156. “We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.”

— Matthew Arnold

157. “Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.”

— Matthew Arnold

158. “The discipline of the Old Testament may be summed up as a discipline teaching us to abhor and flee from sin; the discipline of the New Testament, as a discipline teaching us to die to it.”

— Matthew Arnold

159. “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

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

— Matthew Arnold

161. “The love of science, and the energy and honesty in the pursuit of science, in the best of the Aryan races do seem to correspond in a remarkable way to the love of conduct, and the energy and honesty in the pursuit of conduct, in the best of the Semitic.”

— Matthew Arnold

162. “Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.”

— Matthew Arnold

163. “That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.”

— Matthew Arnold

164. “Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.”

— Matthew Arnold

165. “Was Christ a man like us?-Ah! let us try If we then, too, can be such men as he!”

— Matthew Arnold

166. “To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.”

— Matthew Arnold

167. “Greatness is a spiritual condition.”

— Matthew Arnold

168. “If Paris that brief flight allow, My humble tomb explore! It bears: Eternity, be thou My refuge! and no more.”

— Matthew Arnold

169. “Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.”

— Matthew Arnold

170. “We, peopling the void air, Make Gods to whom to impute The ills we ought to bear; With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily.”

— Matthew Arnold

171. “But thou, my son, study to make prevail One colour in thy life, the hue of truth.”

— Matthew Arnold

172. “Man errs not that he deems His welfare his true aim, He errs because he dreams The world does but exist that welfare to bestow.”

— Matthew Arnold

173. “English civilization the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society that is what interests me.”

— Matthew Arnold

174. “The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere to the subtle, contriving head.”

— Matthew Arnold

175. “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

176. “And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, Self-school’d, self-scann’d, self-honour’d, self-secure, Didst tread on earth unguess’d at. Better so! All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.”

— Matthew Arnold

177. “Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.”

— Matthew Arnold

178. “But so many books thou readest, But so many schemes thou breedest, But so many wishes feedest, That thy poor head almost turns.”

— Matthew Arnold

179. “Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.”

— Matthew Arnold

180. “Mind is a light which the Gods mock us with, To lead those false who trust it.”

— Matthew Arnold

181. “One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man’s life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it.”

— Matthew Arnold

182. “Hither and thither spins The wind-borne mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole.”

— Matthew Arnold

183. “Genius is mainly an affair of energy.”

— Matthew Arnold

184. “The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as they are...”

— Matthew Arnold

185. “It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.”

— Matthew Arnold

186. “The power of the Latin classic is in character, that of the Greek is in beauty. Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.”

— Matthew Arnold

187. “How many minds – almost all the great ones – were formed in secrecy and solitude!”

— Matthew Arnold

188. “The world hath failed to impart the joy our youth forebodes; failed to fill up the void which in our breasts we bear.”

— Matthew Arnold

189. “If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.”

— Matthew Arnold

190. “Miracles are doomed; they will drop out like fairies and witchcraft, from...”

— Matthew Arnold

191. “We must hold fast to the austere but true doctrine as to what really governs politics and saves or destroys states. Having in mind things true, things elevated, things just, things pure, things amiable, things of good report; having these in mind, studying and loving these, is what saves states.”

— Matthew Arnold

192. “The fewer there are who follow the way to perfection, the harder that way is to find.”

— Matthew Arnold

193. “Culture is the most resolute enemy of anarchy, because of the great hopes and designs for the State which culture teaches us to nourish.”

— Matthew Arnold