Matthew Arnold: Man

Matthew Arnold was English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. Explore interesting quotes on man.

Matthew Arnold: 332 quotes8 likes

“The sophist sneers: Fool, take
Thy pleasure, right or wrong!
The pious wail: Forsake
A world these sophists throng!
Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.”

Matthew Arnold book Empedocles on Etna

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

“Nature, with equal mind,
Sees all her sons at play
Sees man control the wind,
The wind sweep man away.”

Matthew Arnold book Empedocles on Etna

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

“Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself.”

"Democracy" (1861)

“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.”

" Growing Old" (1867), st. 7

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

To An Independent Preacher

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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)

“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.”

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

“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.”

The Functions of Criticism at the Present Time (1864)

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

"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