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Matthew Arnold Quotes (1822-1888)
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About Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822 β 15 April 1888) was an English poet, essayist and cultural critic. He also pursued a career as an inspector of schools.
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βNo deep the Poet sees, but wide.β
βAll the live murmur of a summer's day.β
βTired of knocking at preferment's door.β
βFor Time, not Corydon, hath conquer'd thee!β
βI am past thirty, and three parts iced over.β
βHath man no second life? β Pitch this one high!β
βThe Celts certainly have it in a wonderful measure.β
βThe great apostle of the Philistines, Lord Macaulayβ
βHow fair a lot to fill
Is left to each man still.β
Is left to each man still.β
Matthew Arnold Quotes by Topic
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Matthew Arnold on Life 3 quotes
View all 3 quotes on Life →Matthew Arnold on Sweetness 3 quotes
View all 3 quotes on Sweetness →Matthew Arnold on University of Oxford 3 quotes
βHome of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!β
Matthew Arnold on Perfection 3 quotes
βCulture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.β
Matthew Arnold on Love 3 quotes
βGreatness 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.β
Matthew Arnold on Soul 2 quotes
βBut each day brings its petty dust Our soon choked souls to fill.β
Matthew Arnold on Education 2 quotes
βCulture is "To know the best that has been said and thought in the world."β
Matthew Arnold on Culture 2 quotes
βCulture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.β
Matthew Arnold on Youth 2 quotes
βFor rigorous teachers seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimmβd its fire, Showβd me the high white star of Truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire.β
Matthew Arnold on Poetry about love 2 quotes
βAh, 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.β
What Matthew Arnold Said About Others
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Matthew Arnold on William Wordsworth 5 quotes
βDante, Shakspeare, MoliΓ¨re, Milton, Goethe, are altogether larger and more splendid luminaries in the poetical heaven than Wordsworth. But I know not where else, among the moderns, we are to find his superiors.β
Matthew Arnold on Women 4 quotes
View all 4 quotes on Women →Matthew Arnold on Thomas Carlyle 4 quotes
βThat regular Carlylean strain which we all know by heart and which the clear-headed among us have so utter a contempt for.β
Matthew Arnold on Thomas Gray 3 quotes
βGray, a born poet, fell upon an age of prose. He fell upon an age whose task was such as to call forth in general men's powers of understanding, wit and cleverness, rather than their deepest powers of mind and soul.β
Matthew Arnold on William Shakespeare 2 quotes
βI keep saying, Shakspeare, Shakspeare, you are as obscure as life is.β
Matthew Arnold on Thomas Babington Macaulay 2 quotes
βThe immense popularity of Macaulay is due to his being pre-eminently fitted to give pleasure to all who are beginning to feel enjoyment in the things of the mind.β
Matthew Arnold on Sophocles 2 quotes
βBe his My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul From first youth tested up to extreme old age Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole; The mellow glory of the Attic stage, Singer of sweet Colonus, and its child.β
Matthew Arnold on John Milton 2 quotes
βMilton, from one end of Paradise Lost to the other, is in his diction and rhythm constantly a great artist in the great style... That Milton, of all our English race, is by his diction and rhythm the one artist of the highest rank in the great style whom we have; this I take as requiring no discussion, this I take as certain.β
Matthew Arnold on Edmund Burke 2 quotes
βIt is the fashion to treat Burke's writings on the French Revolution as superannuated and conquered by the event; as the eloquent but unphilosophical tirades of bigotry and prejudice. I will not deny that they are often disfigured by the violence and passion of the moment, and that in some directions Burke's view was bounded, and his observation therefore at fault; but on the whole, and for those who can make the needful corrections, what distinguishes these writings is their profound, permanent, fruitful, philosophical truth.β
Matthew Arnold on Mother Nature
Matthew Arnold on Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby
β[T]he true type of the British political nobleman is Lord Derbyβeloquence, high feeling, and good intentionsβbut the ideas of a school-boy.β
Quotes About Matthew Arnold
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Caption on Matthew Arnold
βAdmit that Homer sometimes nods, that Poets do write trash, Our Bard has written "Balder dead," and also Balder-dash.β
Charlotte BrontΓ« on Matthew Arnold
βIt is observable that Matthew Arnold, the eldest son, and the author of the volume of poems to which you allude, inherits his mother's defect. Striking and prepossessing in appearance, his manner displeased from its seeming foppery. I own it caused me at first to regard him with regretful surprise; the shade of Dr. Arnold seemed to me to frown on his young representative. I was told, however, that "Mr. Arnold improved upon acquaintance." So it was: ere long a real modesty appeared under his assumed conceit, and some genuine intellectual aspirations, as well as high educational acquirements, displaced superficial affectations. I was given to understand that his theological opinions were very vague and unsettled, and indeed he betrayed as much in the course of conversation.β
Philadelphia poet Florence Earle Coates on Arnold β who both encouraged on Matthew Arnold
βA democrat by conviction rather than by temperament, urging democracy as 'the only method consistent with human instinct toward expansion,' he was yet an educator, and believed in equality upon a high, not upon a low plane. Like Ruskin, he demanded of men their best, and with less than their best refused to be satisfied.β
William Harbutt Dawson on Matthew Arnold
βBut whatever the deity which satisfied Arnold's personal experience may have been, the religion which he gives us in Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible is neither Deism nor bare Pan-Deism, but a diluted Positivism. As an ethical system it is in theory admirable, but its positive value is in the highest degree questionable. Pascal's judgment upon the God who emerged from the philosophical investigations of Rene Descartes was that He was a God who was unnecessary. And one may with even greater truth say that the man who is able to receive and live by the religion which Arnold offers him is no longer in need of its help and stimulus. To be able to appreciate an ethical idealism a man must himself be already an ethical idealist.β
Richard Garnett on Matthew Arnold 3 quotes
β[O]n discovering himself to be at issue with the bulk of his countrymen in every region of opinion, Arnold subsequently undertook the unpopular office of detector-general of the intellectual failings of his own nation. The cast of his mind was rather critical than constructive, and the gradual drying up of his native spring of poetry, at no time copious, left him no choice between criticism and silence.β
Simon Heffer on Matthew Arnold
βHis is perhaps the greatest mind of the nineteenth century, in its ability to cut to the heart of debate and to identify what the issues of society really were.β
Richard Holt Hutton on Matthew Arnold
βThere is always a tincture of pride in his confessed inability to believeβa self-congratulation that he is too clear-eyed to yield to the temptations of the heart. He asks with compassionate imperiousness for demonstration rather than conviction; conviction he will not take without demonstration. The true humility of the yearning for faith is far from Mr. Arnold's conception.β
Benjamin Jowett on Matthew Arnold
βMat. Arnold is a great loss to me. He was one of my firmest and dearest and best friends. Every year I had a higher opinion of him. No one ever united so much kindness and lightheartedness with so much strength. He was the most sensible man of genius whom I have ever known and the most free from personality, and his mind was very far from being exhausted.β
John Campbell Shairp on Matthew Arnold
βSo full of power, yet blithe and debonair, Rallying his friends with pleasant banter gay, Or half a-dream chaunting with jaunty air Great words of Goethe, catch of BΓ©ranger.β
Misattributed Quotes
Quotes mistakenly credited to Matthew Arnold
βThings and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why, then, should we desire to be deceived?β
About Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822 β 15 April 1888) was an English poet, essayist and cultural critic. He also pursued a career as an inspector of schools.