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Matthew Arnold Quotes
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Matthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator. Matthew Arnold has been characterised as a sage writer, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues. Wikipedia  

✵ 24. December 1822 – 15. April 1888
Matthew Arnold photo
Matthew Arnold: 166   quotes 8   likes

Matthew Arnold Quotes

“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)

“Such a price
The Gods exact for song;
To become what we sing.”

Matthew Arnold

" The Strayed Reveller to Ulysses http://www.poetry-archive.com/a/the_strayed_reveller_to_ulysses.html"

God , Singing

“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

"Democracy" (1861)

Question , Thinking

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

Matthew Arnold

"A Word More About America" (1885)

“The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.”

Matthew Arnold book Culture and Anarchy

Source: Culture and Anarchy (1869), Ch. IV, Hebraism and Hellenism

Idea

“On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.”

Matthew Arnold

Literary Influence of Academies, p. 69
Essays in Criticism (1865)

History

“Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration.”

Matthew Arnold book Culture and Anarchy

Source: Culture and Anarchy (1869), Ch. I, Sweetness and Light

Love

“Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.”

Matthew Arnold

"Mixed Essays, Equality" (1879)

Nature

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

Matthew Arnold

Source: Literature and Dogma (1873), Ch. 1

Life

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

Matthew Arnold

To An Independent Preacher

Lie , Hope , Nature

“The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.”

Matthew Arnold On Translating Homer

On Translating Homer (1861)

Nature

“Calm soul of all things! make it mine
To feel, amid the city’s jar,
That there abides a peace of thine,
Man did not make, and cannot mar.”

Matthew Arnold

"Lines Written in Kensington Gardens" (1852), st. 10

Peace , Feeling , Soul

“Ah! two desires toss about
The poet's feverish blood;
One drives him to the world without,
And one to solitude.”

Matthew Arnold

"Stanzas in Memory of the Author of "Obermann"" (1852), st. 24

World , Solitude

“How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves!
Again — thou hearest?
Eternal passion!
Eternal pain!”

Matthew Arnold

"Philomela" (1853), st. 3

Pain , Passion

“Burke is so great because, almost alone in England, he brings thought to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought.”

Matthew Arnold

The Functions of Criticism at the Present Time (1864)

“Steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection, — to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side? — nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tübingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!”

Matthew Arnold

Preface to the Second Edition (1869)
Essays in Criticism (1865)

Truth , Age , Beauty , Home

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

Matthew Arnold book Culture and Anarchy

Source: Culture and Anarchy (1869), Ch. III, Barbarians, Philistines, Populace

Life

“Style…is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.”

Matthew Arnold

" On the Study of Celtic Literature http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/scl/index.htm" (1867), Pt. 6

“All are before me! I behold
The House, the Brotherhood austere!
— And what am I, that I am here? For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire,
Show'd me the high, white star of Truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:
What dost thou in this living tomb?”

Matthew Arnold

Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse (1855)

Truth , Youth , Faith , Star

“The day in his hotness,
The strife with the palm;
The night in her silence,
The stars in their calm.”

Matthew Arnold book Empedocles on Etna

Act II
Empedocles on Etna (1852)

Star , Silence , Night

“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 book Culture and Anarchy

Preface, 1st Ed
Culture and Anarchy (1869)

Life , Thinking , Reading , Dependency

“So, loath to suffer mute.
We, peopling the void air,
Make Gods to whom to impute
The ills we ought to bear.”

Matthew Arnold book Empedocles on Etna

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

God , People , Suffering

“Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.”

Matthew Arnold book Culture and Anarchy

Source: Culture and Anarchy (1869), Ch. I, Sweetness and Light

Love , Study , Perfection

“The Celts certainly have it in a wonderful measure.”

Matthew Arnold

Referring to style, in On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), Pt. 6

“Therefore to thee it was given
Many to save with thyself;
And, at the end of thy day,
O faithful shepherd! to come,
Bringing thy sheep in thy hand.”

Matthew Arnold

St. 9
Rugby Chapel (1867)

Faith

“What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.”

Matthew Arnold

" Civilization in the United States http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=ArnCivi.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all" (1888)

Beauty

“Charge once more, then, and be dumb!
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find thy body by the wall.”

Matthew Arnold The Last Word

St. 4
The Last Word (1867)

“Below the surface stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say and feel — below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel, there flows
With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.”

Matthew Arnold

"St. Paul and Protestantism" (1870)

Feeling , Thinking , Light , Strong

“I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture.”

Matthew Arnold book Culture and Anarchy

Introduction
Culture and Anarchy (1869)

“And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well — but ’tis not true!”

Matthew Arnold

"The Buried Life" (1852), st. 6

“Peace, peace is what I seek and public calm,
Endless extinction of unhappy hates.”

Matthew Arnold

"Merope" (1858), line 100

Hate , Peace

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

Matthew Arnold Switzerland

"Switzerland", IV. "Parting" (1853)

God , Heart

“Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.”

Matthew Arnold

Byron
Essays in Criticism, second series (1888)

“The translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author: — that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that he is eminently noble.”

Matthew Arnold On Translating Homer

On Translating Homer (1861)

Idea , Sense

“Are ye too changed, ye hills?
See, ’tis no foot of unfamiliar men
Tonight from Oxford up your pathway strays!
Here came I often, often, in old days;
Thyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then.”

Matthew Arnold Thyrsis

St. 1
Thyrsis (1866)

Men , Change

“Cruel, but composed and bland,
Dumb, inscrutable and grand,
So Tiberius might have sat,
Had Tiberius been a cat.”

Matthew Arnold

" Poor Matthias http://www.flippyscatpage.com/frompoormatthias.html" (1867)

Cats

“The great apostle of the Philistines, Lord Macaulay”

Matthew Arnold

Joubert, pp. 234–5
Essays in Criticism (1865)