Matthew Arnold
Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.Collection: Society
Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.Collection: Beauty
Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.Collection: Patience
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.Collection: Truth
Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.Collection: Best
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!Collection: Home
Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.Collection: Life
The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.Collection: Age
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.Collection: Nature
To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.Collection: Happiness
Journalism is literature in a hurry.Collection: Communication
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.Collection: Communication
The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.Collection: Religion
It is so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done.
And we forget because we must and not because we will.
Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
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.
Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.
Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.
Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.
Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest and admiration.
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.
Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.
Spare me the whispering, crowded room, the friends who come and gape and go, the ceremonious air of gloom - all, which makes death a hideous show.
France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.
Life is not having and getting, but being and becomingCollection: Life
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.Collection: Time
Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.Collection: Class
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.Collection: Dance
For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.Collection: Ideas
Greatness is a spiritual condition.Collection: Spiritual
I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today.Collection: Believe
How many minds--almost all the great ones--were formed in secrecy and solitude!Collection: Solitude
Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Art
Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.Collection: Writing
One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common--discontent.Collection: Age
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.Collection: Perfection
Art still has truth. Take refuge there.Collection: Art
Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is ready.Collection: World
The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.Collection: School
Genius is mainly an affair of energy.Collection: Life
If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.Collection: Men