A Quote by Matthew Arnold

Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion--the passion for sweetness and light. It has one even yet greater, the passion for making them all prevail. It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindly masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light.

Matthew Arnold

Quote Topics

Beyond Come Culture Even Few Great Great Passion Greater Hates Hatred Humanity Imperfect Knows Light Looks Machinery Making Man Masses Must Passion Perfect Perfect Man Prevail Raw Satisfied Sweetness Them Till Touched Until

Quote Author

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

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

Matthew Arnold

Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.

Matthew Arnold

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.... He who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and the will of God prevail.

Matthew Arnold

I share with many people the feeling that there is a sweetness and constancy to light that falls into a studio from the north sky that sets it beyond any other illumination. It is a light of such penetrating clarity that even a simple object lying by chance in such a light takes on an inner glow, almost a voluptuousness.

Irving Penn

A man who hates the passion cuts off their causes. But a man who remains among their causes experiences even against his will the conflict from the passions. It is not possible to be mentally inclined toward a passion if one does not love its cause. For who, disdaining shame, is given to vainglory? Or who, loving lowliness, is bothered by dishonor? Who, having a broken and humble heart, accepts fleshly sweetness? Or who, believing in Christ, is concerned about temporal things, or argues about them?

Marcus Eremita

Passion now begins to wake and whom we desire, we will take then we'll cut them down to the quick love itself the cruelest trick. Moved we are by loves sweet song though it plays not for long we can blow on embers bright till passion outtakes the light.

Nancy Holder

One can't measure the life with its bitterness but with it's sweetness and sweetness is what one must find in Jesus Words

Aftab Alam

where is the 'punch' in sweetness and light?

Louella Parsons

The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light...It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within that great general light of existence.

Marilynne Robinson

Nobody's interested in sweetness and light.

Hedda Hopper

I wouldn't be young again even if it were possible, but I am not going to pretend that growing old is all sweetness and light.

Ruth Rendell

The Greek word euphuia, a finely tempered nature, gives exactly the notion of perfection as culture brings us to perceive it; a harmonious perfection, a perfection in which the characters of beauty and intelligence are both present, which unites "the two noblest of things" - as Swift most happily calls them in his Battle of the Books, "the two noblest of things, sweetness and light."

Matthew Arnold

The two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.

Jonathan Swift

Sweetness eliminates gravity and thus a man with a heavy burden of life starts feeling like floating in the air before sweetness.

Mehmet Murat Ildan

The contrast between the two, the sweetness and the badness, wrenches the heart of the lover as such sweetness on its own would not, and the lover shudders all the more at dread of the beloved's recklessness, for the sake of the sweetness that is there, and the shudder only makes more violent the shuddering that announces love.