Matthew Arnold

Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest and admiration.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.

Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

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

Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.

A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time.

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

Calms not lifes crown though calm is well.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Greatness is a spiritual condition.

France famed in all great arts in none supreme.

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

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

Poetry is, at bottom, a criticism of life.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They... who await No gifts from Chance have conquered Fate.

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

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

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

Sanity that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.

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

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

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.

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

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