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Matthew Arnold (1822 – 1888)


English poet, essayist and cultural critic.
Matthew Arnold
Ah! two desires toss about
The poet's feverish blood;
One drives him to the world without,
And one to solitude.
Arnold quotes
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.
Arnold
Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep,
Where the winds are all asleep.




Arnold Matthew quotes
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.
Arnold Matthew
The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.
Matthew Arnold quotes
The great apostle of the Philistines, Lord Macaulay.
Matthew Arnold
Critical power...tends to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces; to make the best ideas prevail.
Arnold Matthew quotes
The crown of literature is poetry.
Arnold
So, loath to suffer mute.
We, peopling the void air,
Make Gods to whom to impute
The ills we ought to bear.
Arnold Matthew
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
Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.




Matthew Arnold quotes
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
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.
Arnold quotes
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.
Arnold Matthew
Creep into thy narrow bed,
Creep, and let no more be said!
Arnold Matthew quotes
Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
Matthew Arnold
What shelter to grow ripe is ours?
What leisure to grow wise?
Matthew Arnold quotes
Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece,
Long since, saw Byron’s struggle cease.
Matthew Arnold
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.
Arnold Matthew
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.


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