Matthew Arnold Quotes - Page 9

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?

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.

Time may restore us in his course Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force: But where will Europe's latter hour Again find Wordsworth's healing power?

In our English popular religion the common conception of a future state of bliss is that of ... a kind of perfected middle-class home, with labour ended, the table spread, goodness all around, the lost ones restored, hymnody incessant.

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.

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

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.

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

Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.

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.

To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.

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

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

What shelter to grow ripe is ours? What leisure to grow wise?

Spare me the whispering, crowded room, the friends who come and gape and go, the ceremonious air of gloom - all, which makes death a hideous show.

Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.

Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.

The discipline of the Old Testament may be summed up as a discipline teaching us to abhor and flee from sin; the discipline of the New Testament, as a discipline teaching us to die to it.

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.

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men, And falsehood, while I lived, was far from mine.

And amongst us one, Who most has suffer'd, takes dejectedly His seat upon the intellectual throne.

And each day brings it's pretty dust, Our soon-choked souls to fll And we forget because we must, And not because we will.

Religion--that voice of the deepest human experience.

Hither and thither spins The wind-borne mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole.

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