Explore Quotes by Matthew Arnold

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

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

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

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

Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.

Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

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