Matthew Arnold Quotes

Quotes about:

• Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming

  Matthew Arnold

  Life, Becoming, Life Is

  53 Copy quote

• If there ever comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a force such as the world has never known.

  Matthew Arnold

  Time, Together, World

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• Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.

  Matthew Arnold

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Sadness

  'Self-Dependence' (1852) l. 31

  49 Copy quote

• Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

  Matthew Arnold

  Class, Wealth, Middle

  Matthew Arnold (2013). “Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (Illustrated)”, p.816, Delphi Classics

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• Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

  Matthew Arnold

  Beautiful, Impressive, Poetry Is

  Matthew Arnold (2013). “Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (Illustrated)”, p.689, Delphi Classics

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• 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

  Dance, History, Art And Culture

  'Literature and Dogma' (1873) preface

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• The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

  Matthew Arnold

  Inspirational, Wisdom, Common Sense

  God and the Bible: A Review of Objections to Literature and Dogma (1875)

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• 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

  Thinking, Men, Each Day

  Matthew Arnold (1869). “Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism”, p.9

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• I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today.

  Matthew Arnold

  Believe, Yesterday, Today

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• For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.

  Matthew Arnold

  Ideas, World, Illusion

  Matthew Arnold (1961). “Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold”, Houghton Mifflin College Division

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• Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.

  Matthew Arnold

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

  45 Copy quote

• History - a vast Mississippi of falsehoods

  Matthew Arnold

  Mississippi, Falsehood

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

  Matthew Arnold

  Culture, World, Said

  Attributed to Matthew Arnold's "Literature and Dogma". "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations", pp. 216-218, 1922.

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• Greatness is a spiritual condition.

  Matthew Arnold

  Spiritual, Greatness, Soul

  Matthew Arnold (2016). “Culture and Anarchy”, p.14, BookRix

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• Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.

  Matthew Arnold

  Character, Perfection, Personality

  Culture and Anarchy ch. 1 (1869)

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• How many minds--almost all the great ones--were formed in secrecy and solitude!

  Matthew Arnold

  Solitude, Mind, Secrecy

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

  Matthew Arnold

  Men, Saint, Be A Man

  'Empedocles on Etna' (1852) act 1, sc. 2, l. 136

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• This strange disease of modern life,
  With its sick hurry, its divided aims.

  Matthew Arnold

  Life, Sick, Disease

  'The Scholar-Gipsy' (1853) l. 201

  29 Copy quote

• Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

  Matthew Arnold

  Writing, Secret, Famous Writers

  Quoted in G.W. E. Russell, Collections and Recollections (1898)

  31 Copy quote

• The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay ... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.

  Matthew Arnold

  Art, Destiny, Race

  Matthew Arnold (1961). “Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold”, Houghton Mifflin College Division

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• Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.

  Matthew Arnold

  Ideas, Profound, Noble

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• Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is ready.

  Matthew Arnold

  World, Force, Ready

  Matthew Arnold, Stefan Collini (1993). “Arnold: 'Culture and Anarchy' and Other Writings”, p.33, Cambridge University Press

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• 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

  Men, Light, Growth

  Matthew Arnold (1894). “Mixed Essays: Irish Essays and Others”

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• One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common--discontent.

  Matthew Arnold

  Age, Common, Youth

  'Youth's Agitations' (1852)

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• Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  Matthew Arnold

  Life, Beautiful, Dream

  "Dover Beach" l. 35 (1867)

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