Best 224 quotes of Matthew Arnold on MyQuotes

Ah, love, let us be true To one another!

Ah love, let us be true to one another, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams; so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy nor love nor life.

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

Alas! is even love too weak To unlock the heart, and let it speak? Are even lovers powerless to reveal To one another what indeed they feel? I knew the mass of men conceal'd Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd They would by other men be met With blank indifference, or with blame reproved; I knew they lived and moved Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest Of men, and alien to themselves - and yet The same heart beats in every human breast!

Alas! is even love too weak To unlock the heart, and let it speak?

All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.

All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow, Find their sole voice in that victorious brow.

All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.

All this I bear, for, what I seek, I know: Peace, peace is what I seek, and public calm: Endless extinction of unhappy hates.

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

And as long as the world lasts, all who want to make progress in righteousness will come to Israel for inspiration, as to the people who have had the sense for righteousness most glowing and strongest; and in hearing and reading the words Israel has uttered for us, carers for conduct will find a glow and a force they could find nowhere else.

And each day brings it's pretty dust, Our soon-choked souls to fll And we forget because we must, And not because we will.

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!

And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and hustle by; And never once possess our soul Before we die.

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

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.

And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, / Self-schooled, self-scanned, self-honoured, self-secure / Didst tread on earth unguessed at. Better so!.

Art still has truth. Take refuge there.

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.

Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.

Beautiful city! . . . spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age . . . her ineffable charm. . . . Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic!

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

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.

Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life; A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course; A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us—to know Whence our lives come and where they go.

But so many books thou readest, But so many schemes thou breedest, But so many wishes feedest, That thy poor head almost turns.

But the idea of science and systematic knowledge is wanting to our whole instruction alike, and not only to that of our business class ... In nothing do England and the Continent at the present moment more strikingly differ than in the prominence which is now given to the idea of science there, and the neglect in which this idea still lies here; a neglect so great that we hardly even know the use of the word science in its strict sense, and only employ it in a secondary and incorrect sense.

But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.

But thou, my son, study to make prevail One colour in thy life, the hue of truth.

Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well.

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! The will to neither strive nor cry, The power to feel what others give! Calm, calm me more! nor let me die Before I have begun to live.

Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.

Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye Forever doth accompany mankind, Hath look'd on no religion scornfully That men did ever find.

Coldly, sadly descends The autumn evening. The Field Strewn with its dank yellow drifts Of wither'd leaves, and the elms, Fade into dimness apace, Silent; hardly a shout From a few boys late at their play!

Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.

Come, dear children, let us away; Down and away below!

Come to me in my dreams, and then By day I shall be well again. For then the night will more than pay The hopeless longing of the day.

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

Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?

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

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

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.

Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one

Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.

Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.

Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion--the passion for sweetness and light. It has one even yet greater, the passion for making them all prevail. It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindly masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light.

Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.

Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.

Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.