Matthew Arnold Quotes

Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming

History - a vast Mississippi of falsehoods

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

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.

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

Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

All the live murmur of a summer's day.

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

Greatness is a spiritual condition.

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

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

One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Art still has truth. Take refuge there.