Matthew Arnold Quotes

Who hesitate and falter life away and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
Matthew Arnold
This strange disease of modern life with its sick hurry its divided aims.
Matthew Arnold
The pursuit of the perfect then is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
Matthew Arnold
Resolve to be thyself and know that he who finds himself loses his misery.
Matthew Arnold
Resolve to be thyself ... he who finds himself loses his misery!
Matthew Arnold
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald with a baldness full of grandeur.
Matthew Arnold
The same heart beats in every human breast.
Matthew Arnold
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
Matthew Arnold
Nature with equal mind sees all her sons at play sees man control the wind the wind sweep man away.
Matthew Arnold
Resolve to be thyself ... he who finds himself loses his misery!
Matthew Arnold
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald with a baldness full of grandeur.
Matthew Arnold
The same heart beats in every human breast.
Matthew Arnold
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
Matthew Arnold
Nature with equal mind sees all her sons at play sees man control the wind the wind sweep man away.
Matthew Arnold
We forget because we must And not because we will.
Matthew Arnold
They who await no gifts from chance have conquered fate.
Matthew Arnold
Resolve to be thyself and know that who finds himself loses his misery.
Matthew Arnold
Is it 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 nice sense of measure is certainly not one of Nature's gifts to her English children ... we have all of us yielded to infatuation at some moment of our lives.
Matthew Arnold
Poetry is simply the most beautiful impressive and widely effective mode of saying things.
Matthew Arnold
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
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
For rigorous teachers seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire, Show'd me the high, white star of Truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire. Even now their whispers pierce the gloom: What dost thou in this living tomb?
Matthew Arnold
, And you, ye stars,Who slowly begin to marshal,As of old, the fields of heaven,Your distant, melancholy lines!Have you, too, survived yourselves?Are you, too, what I fear to become?You, too, once lived;You, too, moved joyfullyAmong august companions,In an older world, peopled by Gods,In a mightier order,The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent Sons of Heaven.But now, ye kindleYour lonely, cold-shining lights,Unwilling lingerersIn the heavenly wilderness,For a younger, ignoble world;And renew, by necessity,Night after night your courses,In echoing, unneared silence,Above a race you know not—Uncaring and undelighted,Without friend and without home;Weary like us, though notWeary with our weariness.
Matthew Arnold
For rigorous teachers seized my youth,And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire,Showed me the high, white star of Truth,There bade me gaze, and there aspire.Even now their whispers pierce the gloom'What dost thou in this living tomb?
Matthew Arnold
Waiting from heaven for the spark to fall.
Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies fairUpon the straits;- on the French coast the lightGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Matthew Arnold
Alas, is even Love too weak to unlock the heart and let it speak? Are even lovers powerless to reveal To one another what indeed they feel?
Matthew Arnold
Up the still, glistening beaches,Up the creeks we will hie,Over banks of bright seaweedThe ebb-tide leaves dry.We will gaze, from the sand-hills,At the white, sleeping town;At the church on the hill-side—And then come back down.Singing: "There dwells a loved one,But cruel is she!She left lonely for everThe kings of the sea.(from poem 'The Forsaken Merman')
Matthew Arnold
But often, in the world's most crowded streets,But often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life;A thirst to spend our fire and restless forceIn tracking out our true, original course.
Matthew Arnold
Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.
Matthew Arnold
Come to me in my dreams, and thenBy day I shall be well again!For so the night will more than payThe hopeless longings of the day.
Matthew Arnold
Only--but this is rare--When a beloved hand is laid in ours,When, jaded with the rush and glareOf the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,When our world-deafen'd earIs by the tones of a loved voice caress'd--A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.A man becomes aware of his life's flow,And hears its winding murmur; and he seesThe meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
Matthew Arnold
Weary of myself, and sick of asking What I am, and what I ought to be, At this vessel's prow I stand, which bears me Forwards, forwards, o'er the starlit sea.
Matthew Arnold
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,But often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life;A thirst to spend our fire and restless forceIn tracking out our true, original course;A longing to inquireInto the mystery of this heart which beatsSo wild, so deep in us—to knowWhence our lives come and where they go.
Matthew Arnold
Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Matthew Arnold