Matthew Arnold: Trending quotes

Matthew Arnold trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection

Matthew Arnold: 332 quotes9 likes

“I am past thirty, and three parts iced over.”

Letter to Arthur Hugh Clough (12 February 1853)

“At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.”

Preface to God and the Bible (1875)

“Singing, "Here came a mortal,
But faithless was she:
And alone dwell for ever
The kings of the sea."”

St. 7
The Forsaken Merman (1849)

“Thee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe,
Returning home on summer-nights, have met
Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe,
Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet,
As the punt’s rope chops round.”

St. 8
The Scholar Gypsy (1853)

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

Heinrich Heine, p. 146
Essays in Criticism (1865)

“A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”

On Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron
Essays in Criticism, second series (1888)

“If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers.”

Civilization in the United States (1888), p. 177

“Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why, then, should we desire to be deceived?”

Joseph Butler, Human Nature and Other Sermons, "Sermon VII" as quoted in Arnold's "St. Paul and Protestantism" (1870).
Misattributed

“Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask — Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge.”

" Shakespeare http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/marnold/bl-marn-shakes.htm" (1849, st. 1)

“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.”

"Schools and Universities on the Continent" (1868)

“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.”

Diary entry for the day he died (15 April 1888); from Ecclesiasticus, xxxviii
Matthew Arnold's Notebooks (1902)

“And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.”

Matthew Arnold Thyrsis

St. 2
Thyrsis (1866)

“The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.”

Matthew Arnold Dover Beach

St. 3
Dover Beach (1867)

“O strong soul, by what shore
Tarriest thou now? For that force,
Surely, has not been left vain!”

St. 4
Rugby Chapel (1867)

“And amongst us one,
Who most has suffer’d, takes dejectedly
His seat upon the intellectual throne.”

St. 19
The Scholar Gypsy (1853)

“The notion of the free play of the mind upon all subjects being a pleasure in itself, being an object of desire, being an essential provider of elements without which a nation's spirit, whatever compensations it may have for them, must, in the long run, die of inanition, hardly enters into an Englishman's thoughts.”

The Functions of Criticism at the Present Time (1864)

“Choose equality.”

"Mixed Essays, Equality" (1879)

“People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.”

G.W.E. Russell, Collections and Recollections, ch. XIV, Harper & brothers, 1898, p. 136 https://archive.org/details/collectionsandr02russgoog/page/n152. Russell states that was said to him by Arnold himself. <br class="br">Attributed

“Because without order there can be no society, and without society there can be no human perfection.”

Matthew Arnold book Culture and Anarchy

Source: Culture and Anarchy (1869), p. 41

“Hear it, O Thyrsis, still our tree is there!”

Matthew Arnold Thyrsis

Ah, vain! These English fields, this upland dim,
These brambles pale with mist engarlanded,
That lone, sky-pointing tree, are not for him;
To a boon southern country he is fled,
And now in happier air,
Wandering with the great Mother’s train divine
(And purer or more subtle soul than thee,
I trow, the mighty Mother doth not see)
Within a folding of the Apennine.
St. 18
Thyrsis (1866)