Matthew Arnold Quotes (166 quotes, page 3)

“Who prop, thou ask'st in these bad days, my mind?
He much, the old man, who, clearest-souled of men,
Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen,
And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though blind.”

Matthew Arnold

"To a Friend" http://www.poetry-online.org/arnold_to_a_friend.htm (1849), line 1

Men , Soul

“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.”

Matthew Arnold

The Functions of Criticism at the Present Time (1864)

Literature

“And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,
Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure,
Didst tread on earth unguess'd at. — Better so! All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,
Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.”

Matthew Arnold

"Shakespeare" (1849)

Pain , Star , Victory

“Let the long contention cease!
Geese are swans, and swans are geese.”

Matthew Arnold The Last Word

St. 2
The Last Word (1867)

“How fair a lot to fill
Is left to each man still.”

Matthew Arnold

"A Summer Night," Poems: Second Series, (1855), last stanza http://books.google.com/books?id=IzpcAAAAcAAJ&q=%22How+fair+a+lot+to+fill+Is+left+to+each+man+still%22&pg=PA210#v=onepage

“Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and wisely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.”

Matthew Arnold

Heinrich Heine, p. 144
Essays in Criticism (1865)

Beauty

“Of these two literatures, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge — theology, philosophy, history, art, science — to see the object as in itself it really is.”

Matthew Arnold On Translating Homer

On Translating Homer (1861)

Art , History , Literature , Knowledge

“O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o’ertax’d, its palsied hearts, was rife.”

Matthew Arnold

St. 21
The Scholar Gypsy (1853)

Life , Disease , Heart

“Her cabin’d, ample Spirit,
It flutter’d and fail’d for breath.
To-night it doth inherit
The vasty Hall of Death.”

Matthew Arnold

"Requiescat" (1853), st. 4

Death , Night

“Yes: in the sea of life enisl’d,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.”

Matthew Arnold

"To Marguerite, in Returning a Volume of the Letters of Ortis" (1852), stanza 1

Life , Sea

“Where great whales come sailing by,
Sail and sail, with unshut eye,
Round the world for ever and aye?
When did music come this way?
Children dear, was it yesterday?”

Matthew Arnold

St. 3
The Forsaken Merman (1849)

Children , World , Music , Way

“Hither and thither spins
The wind-borne mirroring soul,
A thousand glimpses wins,
And never sees a whole.”

Matthew Arnold book Empedocles on Etna

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

Soul

“Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade,
With a free, onward impulse brushing through,
By night, the silver’d branches of the glade.”

Matthew Arnold

St. 22
The Scholar Gypsy (1853)

Hope , Night

“With women the heart argues, not the mind.”

Matthew Arnold

"Merope" (1858), line 341

Women , Heart

“Why faintest thou! I wander’d till I died.
Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.
Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside.”

Matthew Arnold Thyrsis

St, 24
Thyrsis (1866)

Love , Travel , Tree , Light

“Physician of the Iron Age,
Goethe has done his pilgrimage.
He took the suffering human race,
He read each wound, each weakness clear —
And struck his finger on the place,
And said — Thou ailest here, and here.”

Matthew Arnold

St. 3
Memorial Verses (1852)

Age , Suffering , Reading

“The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.”

Matthew Arnold book Culture and Anarchy

Preface
Culture and Anarchy (1869)

World , Imagination , Knowledge , Help

“The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.”

Matthew Arnold book Culture and Anarchy

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

Men

“There is the world of ideas and there is the world of practice; the French are often for suppressing the one and the English the other; but neither is to be suppressed.”

Matthew Arnold

The Functions of Criticism at the Present Time (1864)

World , Idea

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

Matthew Arnold

Letter to Arthur Hugh Clough (12 February 1853)

Past , Parting

“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.”

Matthew Arnold

Preface to God and the Bible (1875)

Men , Religion

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

Matthew Arnold

St. 7
The Forsaken Merman (1849)

Singing , Sea

“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.”

Matthew Arnold

St. 8
The Scholar Gypsy (1853)

Home , Summer , Night

“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.”

Matthew Arnold

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

Children , Dogs , Light , Strong

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

Matthew Arnold

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

Beauty , Angels

“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.”

Matthew Arnold

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

Feeling , Search

“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?”

Matthew Arnold

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.”

Matthew Arnold

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

Art , Question , Knowledge

“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.”

Matthew Arnold

"Schools and Universities on the Continent" (1868)

Beauty

“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.”

Matthew Arnold

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

Hurt , Dead

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

Matthew Arnold Thyrsis

St. 2
Thyrsis (1866)

Beauty , Dreams

“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)

World , Faith , Sea , Night

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

Matthew Arnold

St. 4
Rugby Chapel (1867)

Soul , Strong

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

Matthew Arnold

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.”

Matthew Arnold

The Functions of Criticism at the Present Time (1864)

Pleasure

“Choose equality.”

Matthew Arnold

"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.”

Matthew Arnold

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.
Attributed

Thinking , Secret , People

“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

Perfection

“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)

Tree

“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?”

Matthew Arnold

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

Perfection , Truth , Beauty , Age

“The power of the Latin classic is in character, that of the Greek is in beauty.”

Matthew Arnold

Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.
"Schools and Universities on the Continent" (1868)

Beauty

“Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.”

Matthew Arnold Dover Beach

St. 1
Dover Beach (1867)

Sea , Sadness , Drawing

“But — if you cannot give us ease —
Last of the race of them who grieve
Here leave us to die out with these
Last of the people who believe!
Silent, while years engrave the brow;
Silent — the best are silent now. Achilles ponders in his tent,
The kings of modern thought are dumb,
Silent they are though not content,
And wait to see the future come.
They have the grief men had of yore,
But they contend and cry no more.”

Matthew Arnold

Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse (1855)

Waiting , Future , People , Cry

“Forgive me, masters of the mind!
At whose behest I long ago
So much unlearnt, so much resign'd —
I come not here to be your foe!
I seek these anchorites, not in ruth,
To curse and to deny your truth; Not as their friend, or child, I speak!
But as, on some far northern strand,
Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek
In pity and mournful awe might stand
Before some fallen Runic stone —
For both were faiths, and both are gone.”

Matthew Arnold

Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse (1855)

Forgiveness , God , Faith , Truth

“And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,
Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure,
Didst tread on earth unguess'd at.”

Matthew Arnold

Better so! </p><p> All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,
Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.</p>
"Shakespeare" (1849)

Self-confidence , Star