Matthew Arnold: Trending quotes (page 4)

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

Matthew Arnold The Last Word

St. 1
The Last Word (1867)

“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

In a letter to his sister, New Year's Day, 1882. Quoted in the Preface
Matthew Arnold's Notebooks (1902)

Reading , Personality

“The East bowed low before the blast,
In patient deep disdain;
She let the legions thunder past,
And plunged in thought again.”

Matthew Arnold

Quoted from S.R. Goel, (1994) Heroic Hindu resistance to Muslim invaders, 636 AD to 1206 AD.

Past

“But each day brings its petty dust
Our soon-chok’d souls to fill,
And we forget because we must,
And not because we will.”

Matthew Arnold

"Absence" (1857), st. 3

Soul , Forgetting

“Critical power…tends to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces; to make the best ideas prevail.”

Matthew Arnold

The Functions of Criticism at the Present Time (1864)

Idea

“It is — last stage of all —
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.”

Matthew Arnold

" Growing Old" (1867), st. 7

World

“This truth—to prove, and make thine own:
‘Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.”

Matthew Arnold

"Isolation" (1857)

Truth , Art

“The will is free;
Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful;
The seeds of god-like power are in us still;
Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will!”

Matthew Arnold

" Written in Emerson's Essays http://www.bartleby.com/246/414.html" (1849)

God , Beauty , Soul , Strong

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

Matthew Arnold

"Requiescat" (1853), st. 1

“Fate gave, what Chance shall not control,
His sad lucidity of soul.”

Matthew Arnold

Source: Resignation (1849), l. 197

Fate , Sadness , Soul , Chance

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

Matthew Arnold

"Stanzas in Memory of the Author of "Obermann"" (1852), st. 18

“Homer is rapid in his movement, Homer is plain in his words and style, Homer is simple in his ideas, Homer is noble in his manner. Cowper renders him ill because he is slow in his movement, and elaborate in his style; Pope renders him ill because he is artificial both in his style and in his words; Chapman renders him ill because he is fantastic in his ideas; Mr. Newman renders him ill because he is odd in his words and ignoble in his manner.”

Matthew Arnold On Translating Homer

On Translating Homer, p. 336
Essays in Criticism (1865)

Idea

“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

"Preface to Poems" (1854)

Literature

“Wordsworth has gone from us — and ye,
Ah, may ye feel his voice as we!
He too upon a wintry clime
Had fallen — on this iron time
Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears.”

Matthew Arnold

St. 4
Memorial Verses (1852)

Fear , Feeling , Time

“We do not what we ought,
What we ought not, we do,
And lean upon the thought
That chance will bring us through.”

Matthew Arnold book Empedocles on Etna

Act I, sc. ii
Empedocles on Etna (1852)

Chance

“Yet they, believe me, who await
No gifts from Chance, have conquer’d Fate.”

Matthew Arnold

Source: Resignation (1849), l. 248-249

Fate , Chance

“Oh, hide me in your gloom profound,
Ye solemn seats of holy pain!
Take me, cowl'd forms, and fence me round,
Till I possess my soul again;
Till free my thoughts before me roll,
Not chafed by hourly false control!”

Matthew Arnold

Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse (1855)

Pain , Soul , Falseness

“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

St. 6
Memorial Verses (1852)

Time

“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 book Culture and Anarchy

Preface
Culture and Anarchy (1869)

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

Matthew Arnold

The Study of Poetry
Essays in Criticism, second series (1888)