110+ Matthew Arnold Quotes On Poetry, Culture And Romantic

Matthew Arnold was an English poet, essayist, and cultural critic during the Victorian era. He was known for his poetry that focused on the shortcomings of modern life and the search for spiritual and moral guidance. He wrote about topics such as religion, social and political issues, and literature. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Matthew Arnold on poetry, culture, romantic.

Top 10 Matthew Arnold Quotes

1. Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.
2. Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.
3. The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
4. Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.
5. Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children of the light.
6. Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did too!
7. 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.
8. This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.
9. Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.
10. The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.

Matthew Arnold Image Quotes

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next. — Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold Short Quotes

• The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as they are.
• Journalism is literature in a hurry.
• Greatness is a spiritual condition.
• Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
• Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
• All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.
• The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
• Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.
• The same heart beats in every human breast.
• Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.

Matthew Arnold Quotes About Poetry

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

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

The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject. — 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

Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius; therefore a nation whose spirit is characterized by energy may well be imminent in poetry - and we have Shakespeare. — Matthew Arnold

Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry. — Matthew Arnold

Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together, it suggests, however indirectly, high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the emotion so helpful in making principles operative. — Matthew Arnold

Indeed there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one's mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry. — Matthew Arnold

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry. — Matthew Arnold

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion. — Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold Quotes About Culture

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

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

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

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

Men of culture are the true apostles of equality — Matthew Arnold

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

Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one — Matthew Arnold

Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world. — Matthew Arnold

I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture. — Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold Quotes About Light

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

Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed. — Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits;- on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. — Matthew Arnold

Mind is a light which the Gods mock us with, To lead those false who trust it. — Matthew Arnold

With aching hands and bleeding feet We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;We bear the burden and the heatOf the long day, and wish 'twere done.Not till the hours of light returnAll we have built as we discern. — Matthew Arnold

Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we, Light half-believers in our casual deeds . . . Who hesitate and falter life away, And lose tomorrow the ground won today- Ah, do not we, Wanderer, await it too? — 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

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

Nature's great law, and the law of all men's minds? To its own impulse every creature stirs: Live by thy light, and Earth will live by hers. — Matthew Arnold

Light half-believers of our casual creeds, who never deeply felt, nor clearly will d, whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds, whose vague resolves never have been fulfilled. — Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold Quotes About Life

Genius is mainly an affair of energy. — Matthew Arnold

Dreams dawn and fly: friends smile and die, Like spring flowers. Our vaunted life is one long funeral. Men dig graves, with bitter tears, For their dead hopes; and all, Mazed with doubts, and sick with fears, Count the hours. — Matthew Arnold

Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well. — Matthew Arnold

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

Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life. — Matthew Arnold

No, no! The energy of life may be Kept on after the grave, but not begun; And he who flagg'd not in the earthly strife, From strength to strength advancing--only he His soul well-knit, and all his battles won, Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life. — Matthew Arnold

Youth dreams a bliss on this side of death. It dreams a rest, if not more deep, More grateful than this marble sleep; It hears a voice within it tell: Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well. 'Tis all perhaps which man acquires, But 'tis not what our youth desires. — Matthew Arnold

Like driftwood spares which meet and pass Upon the boundless ocean-plain, So on the sea of life, alas! Man nears man, meets, and leaves again. — Matthew Arnold

Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves. — Matthew Arnold

O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts, was rife. — Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold Quotes About World

Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye. — Matthew Arnold

Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born. — Matthew Arnold

Man errs not that he deems His welfare his true aim, He errs because he dreams The world does but exist that welfare to bestow. — Matthew Arnold

The eloquent voice of our century uttered, shortly before leaving the world, a warning cry against the "Anglo- Saxon contagion. — Matthew Arnold

The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. — Matthew Arnold

I am bound by my own definition of criticism : a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world. — Matthew Arnold

One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class. — Matthew Arnold

The sophist sneers: Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong! The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng! Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man. — Matthew Arnold

Ah! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude. — Matthew Arnold

The world hath failed to impart the joy our youth forebodes; failed to fill up the void which in our breasts we bear. — Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity. — Matthew Arnold

Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, Soon will the musk carnations break and swell. — Matthew Arnold

Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again. — Matthew Arnold

Now the great winds shoreward blow Now the salt tides seaward flow Now the wild white horses play Champ and chafe and toss in the spray. — Matthew Arnold

Beautiful city! . . . spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age . . . her ineffable charm. . . . Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! — Matthew Arnold

The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost ideas with Hebraism is conduct and obedience.Nothing can do away with this ineffaceable difference. The Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is, that they hinder right thinking; the Hebrew quarrel with them is, that they hinder right acting. — Matthew Arnold

The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes. — Matthew Arnold

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men. — Matthew Arnold

And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and hustle by; And never once possess our soul Before we die. — Matthew Arnold

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

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

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

What is it to grow old? Is it to lose the glory of the form, The lustre of the eye? Is it for Beauty to forego her wreath? Yes; but not this alone. — Matthew Arnold

But each day brings its petty dust our soon-choked souls to fill, and we forget because we must, and not because we will. — Matthew Arnold

On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence. — Matthew Arnold

We must hold fast to the austere but true doctrine as to what really governs politics and saves or destroys states. Having in mind things true, things elevated, things just, things pure, things amiable, things of good report; having these in mind, studying and loving these, is what saves states. — Matthew Arnold

Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all. — Matthew Arnold

The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere to the subtle, contriving head. — Matthew Arnold

Protestantism has the method of Jesus with His secret too much left out of mind; Catholicism has His secret with His method too much left out of mind; neither has His unerring balance, His intuition, His sweet reasonableness. But both have hold of a great truth, and get from it a great power. — Matthew Arnold

Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye Forever doth accompany mankind, Hath look'd on no religion scornfully That men did ever find. — 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

Most men eddy about Here and there-eat and drink, Chatter and love and hate, Gather and squander, are raised Aloft, are hurled in the dust, Striving blindly, achieving Nothing; and then they die- Perish;-and no one asks Who or what they have been. — Matthew Arnold

Nor bring, to see me cease to live, Some doctor full of phrase and fame, To shake his sapient head, and give The ill he cannot cure a name. — Matthew Arnold

Once read thy own breast right, And thou hast done with fears. — Matthew Arnold

Ah, love, let us be true To one another! — Matthew Arnold

The will is free; Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful; The seeds of godlike power are in us still; Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will! — 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

Miracles do not happen. — Matthew Arnold

Eutrapelia . "A happy and gracious flexibility," Pericles calls this quality of the Athenians...lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice and freedom from stiffness, openness of mind, amiability of manners. — Matthew Arnold

On Sundays, at the matin-chime, The Alpine peasants, two and three, Climb up here to pray; Burghers and dames, at summer's prime, Ride out to church from Chamberry, Dight with mantles gay, But else it is a lonely time Round the Church of Brou. — Matthew Arnold

He spoke, and loos'd our heart in tears. He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth. — Matthew Arnold

For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule. — Matthew Arnold

Weep bitterly over the dead, for he is worthy, and then comfort thyself; drive heaviness away: thou shall not do him good, but hurt thyself. — Matthew Arnold

Cruel, but composed and bland,Dumb, inscrutable and grand,So Tiberius might have sat,Had Tiberius been a cat. — Matthew Arnold

Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron 's struggle cease. — Matthew Arnold

People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is. Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style. — Matthew Arnold

With close-lipped Patience for our only friend, Sad Patience, too near neighbor to Despair. — Matthew Arnold

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair. — Matthew Arnold

But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus. — Matthew Arnold

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

Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power. — Matthew Arnold

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty's heightening... — Matthew Arnold

I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is. — Matthew Arnold

Saw life steadily and saw it whole. — Matthew Arnold

Truth illuminates and gives joy; and it is by the bond of joy, not of pleasure, that men's spirits are indissolubly held. — Matthew Arnold

Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we, Light half-believers of our casual creeds, Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will'd, Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds, Whose vague resolves never have been fulfill'd; For whom each year we see Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new; Who hesitate and falter life away, And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too? — Matthew Arnold

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

Physician of the Iron Age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear -- And struck his finger on the place, And said -- Thou ailest here, and here. — Matthew Arnold

Come to me in my dreams, and then By day I shall be well again. For then the night will more than pay The hopeless longing of the day. — Matthew Arnold

Alas! is even love too weak To unlock the heart, and let it speak? — Matthew Arnold

The power of the Latin classic is in character , that of the Greek is in beauty . Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly. — Matthew Arnold

Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain cradle in Pamere, A foiled circuitous wanderertill at last The longed-for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home of waters opens, bright And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea. — Matthew Arnold

Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge. — Matthew Arnold

We do not what we ought; What we ought not, we do; And lean upon the thought That chance will bring us through; But our own acts, for good or ill, are mightier powers. — Matthew Arnold

The strongest part of a religion today is its unconscious poetry — Matthew Arnold

Life Lessons by Matthew Arnold

1. Matthew Arnold's poetry often reflects his belief that life is a journey of self-discovery, and that we should strive to find our own true path in life.
2. He encourages us to think deeply about the world around us and to be open to new ideas and experiences.
3. He also reminds us to remain humble and to appreciate the beauty of nature and the power of human connection.