Top 245 Quotes & Sayings by Matthew Arnold

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English novelist Matthew Arnold.

Last updated on December 25, 2024.

Matthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the celebrated headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator. Matthew Arnold has been characterised as a sage writer, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues. He was also an inspector of schools for thirty-five years, and supported the concept of state-regulated secondary education.

English - Novelist | December 24, 1822 - April 15, 1888

Source: Wikipedia

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.

Matthew Arnold

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.

Matthew Arnold

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.

Matthew Arnold

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Matthew Arnold

France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.

Matthew Arnold

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

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.

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.

Matthew Arnold

The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

Matthew Arnold

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.

Matthew Arnold

And we forget because we must and not because we will.

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

Matthew Arnold

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.

Matthew Arnold

Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

Matthew Arnold

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.

Matthew Arnold

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

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.

Matthew Arnold

Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.

Matthew Arnold

Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.

Matthew Arnold

Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.

Matthew Arnold

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.

Matthew Arnold

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.

Matthew Arnold

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!

Matthew Arnold

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.

Matthew Arnold

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

The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as they are.

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

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

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

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

Not deep the poet sees, but wide.

Matthew Arnold

Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.

Matthew Arnold

The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

Matthew Arnold

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.

Matthew Arnold

They... who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.

Matthew Arnold

Art still has truth. Take refuge there.

Matthew Arnold

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

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

Matthew Arnold

Greatness is a spiritual condition.

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.

Matthew Arnold

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?

Matthew Arnold

Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming

Matthew Arnold

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

What actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same; that which interests them is permanent and the same also.

Matthew Arnold

Top 245 Quotes & Sayings by Matthew Arnold

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