1822-1888, British Poet, Critic
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
Matthew Arnold – [Baldness]
Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.
Matthew Arnold – [Dreams]
But each day brings its petty dust our soon-choked souls to fill, and we forget because we must, and not because we will.
Matthew Arnold – [Memory]
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.
Matthew Arnold – [Culture]
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.
Matthew Arnold – [Culture]
Greatness is a spiritual condition.
Matthew Arnold – [Greatness]
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
Matthew Arnold – [Colleges and Universities]
If experience has established any one thing in this world, it has established this: that it is well for any great class and description of men in society to be able to say for itself what it wants, and not to have other classes, the so-called educated and intelligent classes, acting for it as its proctors, and supposed to understand its wants and to provide for them. A class of men may often itself not either fully understand its wants, or adequately express them; but it has a nearer interest and a more sure diligence in the matter than any of its proctors, and therefore a better chance of success.
Matthew Arnold – [Class]
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
Matthew Arnold – [Journalism and Journalists]
Light half-believers of our casual creeds, who never deeply felt, nor clearly will d, whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds, whose vague resolves never have been fulfilled.
Matthew Arnold – [Creeds]
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 – [America]
Protestantism has the method of Jesus with His secret too much left out of mind; Catholicism has His secret with His method too much left out of mind; neither has His unerring balance, His intuition, His sweet reasonableness. But both have hold of a great truth, and get from it a great power.
Matthew Arnold – [Christians and Christianity]
Resolve to be thyself: and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
Matthew Arnold – [Self-love]
Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.
Matthew Arnold – [Hope]
The need of expansion is as genuine an instinct in man as the need in a plant for the light, or the need in man himself for going upright. The love of liberty is simply the instinct in man for expansion.
Matthew Arnold – [Growth]
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
Matthew Arnold – [Light]
The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
Matthew Arnold – [Religion]
The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.
Matthew Arnold – [Working Class]
This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.
Matthew Arnold – [Modern and Modernism]
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
Matthew Arnold – [Death and Dying]