Matthew Arnold Quotes

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

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

"Greatness is a spiritual condition."

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

"Resolve to find thyself; and to know that he who finds himself, loses his misery."

"Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace."

"[Oxford] whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age . . . Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!"

"what thwarts us and demands of us the greatest effort is also what can teach us most."

"Eyes too expressive to be blue, / Too lovely to be grey."

"Journalism is literature in a hurry."

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

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

"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."

"To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive."

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

"Resolve to be thyself; and know that who finds himself, loses his misery."

"But the majestic river floated on, / Out of the mist and hum of that low land, / Into the frosty starlight, and there moved, / Rejoicing, through the hushed Chorasmian waste, / Under the solitary moon."

"And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night"

"If experience has established any one thing in this world, it has established this: that it is well for any great class and description of men in society to be able to say for itself what it wants, and not to have other classes, the so-called educated and intelligent classes, acting for it as its proctors, and supposed to understand its wants and to provide for them. A class of men may often itself not either fully understand its wants, or adequately express them; but it has a nearer interest and a more sure diligence in the matter than any of its proctors, and therefore a better chance of success."

"Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair."