Matthew Arnold's Quotes

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.

Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.

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.

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

And we forget because we must and not because we will.

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

Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.

Greatness is a spiritual condition.

Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Spare me the whispering, crowded room, the friends who come and gape and go, the ceremonious air of gloom - all, which makes death a hideous show.

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

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

France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.