A Quote by 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

Quote Topics

Power Concur Creation Enough He Man Literature Man Moment Must Powers Two Without

Quote Author

Matthew Arnold
English - Novelist
December 24, 1822 - April 15, 1888

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid...He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world

Raymond Chandler

We must love because we are loved by God. We must be conscious of death if we are to have a proper understanding of life. We must struggle in order to grow, but without falling into the trap of the power we gain through that struggle, because we know that power is worthless. Finally, we must accept that our eternal soul is, at this moment, caught in the web of time with all its opportunities and its limitations.

Paulo Coelho

Man is a machine, but a very peculiar machine. He is a machine which, in right circumstances, and with right treatment, can know that he is a machine, and having fully realized this, he may find the ways to cease to be a machine. First of all, what man must know is that he is not one; he is many. He has not one permanent and unchangeable “I” or Ego. He is always different. One moment he is one, another moment he is another, the third moment he is a third, and so on, almost without end.

P.D. Ouspensky

Then I saw it, and it just grabbed me. That moment, that breath just before destiny, between innocence and power. He'll pull the sword free. You know it. And in that moment, the world changes. Camelot's born, Arthur's fate is sealed. He'll unite a people, be betrayed by a woman and a friend, and sire the man who'll kill him. In this moment, he's a boy. In the next he'll be a king.

Nora Roberts

The past has no power over us. It doesn't matter how long we have had a negative pattern. The point of power is in the present moment. What a wonderful thing to realize! We can begin to be free in this moment!

Louise Hay

To keep any great nation up to a high standard of civilization there must be enough superior characters to hold the balance of power, but the very moment the balance of power gets into the hands of second-rate men and women, a decline of that nation is inevitable.

Christian D. Larson

A woman should never underestimate the power of the child in the man. Sometimes the child seems to be in the driver's seat at the very moment when all a man's adult judgment and insight is needed.

Joyce Brothers

Money power cannot be separated from democratic power without miscarriage and ensuing frustration - political and economic. Democracy implies the sovereignty of man; and, since man cannot be sovereign without the money power, there can not be democracy under the political money system.

E.C. Riegel

Ever judge of men by their professions. For though the bright moment of promising is but a moment, and cannot be prolonged, yet if sincere in its moment's extravagant goodness, why, trust it, and know the man by it, I say,- not by his performance; which is half the world's work, interfere as the world needs must with its accidents and circumstances: the profession was purely the man's own. I judge people by what they might be,- not are, nor will be.

Robert Browning

Man has always desired power. Ownership of property gives this power. Man hankers also after posthumous fame based on power.

Mahatma Gandhi

Greatness is great power, producing great effects. It is not enough that a man has great power in himself, he must shew it to all the world in a way that cannot be hid or gainsaid.

William Hazlitt

Man's conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man's side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.

C. S. Lewis

Creative art is the power to be for a moment a flash of communication between God and man.

Ruth Sawyer

Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads. No man is wise enough, nor good enough to be trusted with unlimited power.

Charles Caleb Colton

An actor must communicate his author's given message--comedy, tragedy, serio- comedy; then comes his unique moment, as he is confronted by the looked-for, yet at times unexpected, reaction of the audience. This split second is his; he is in command of his medium; the effect vanishes into thin air; but that moment has a power all its own and, like power in any form, is stimulating and alluring.