Matthew Arnold > Quotes

“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, Dover Beach and Other Poems

“Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.”
― Matthew Arnold

“Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again!
For so the night will more than pay
The hopeless longings of the day.”
― Matthew Arnold, Longing

“But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.”
― Matthew Arnold, The Complete Poems

“We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I do not know.”
― Matthew Arnold, Essays In Criticism By Matthew Arnold

“Journalism is literature in a hurry.”
― Matthew Arnold

“The free thinking of one age is the common sense of the next.”
― Matthew Arnold

“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.”
― 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

“Is it so small a thing
To have enjoy’d the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done;
To have advanc’d true friends, and beat down baffling foes;

That we must feign a bliss
Of doubtful future date,
And, while we dream on this,
Lose all our present state,
And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose?”
― Matthew Arnold

“And we forget because we must and not because we will.”
― Matthew Arnold

“Art still has truth. Take refuge there.”
― Matthew Arnold

“Wandering between two worlds, one dead
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
”
― Matthew Arnold

“The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;- on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.”
― Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach and Other Poems

“Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.”
― Matthew Arnold, Sohrab and Rustum

“Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery.”
― Matthew Arnold, The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold

“Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born.”
― Matthew Arnold

“Is it so small a thing
To have enjoy'd the sun,
To have liv'd light in the spring,
To have lov'd, to have thought, to have done;
To have advanc'd true friends, and beat down baffling foes...?”
― Matthew Arnold, Empedocles On Etna And Other Poems

“To see the object as in itself it really is”
― Matthew Arnold, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time

“The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.”
― Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach and Other Poems

“Culture is the endeavour to know the best and to make this knowledge prevail for the good of all humankind.”
― Matthew Arnold

“Choose equality.”
― Matthew Arnold

“Only--but this is rare--
When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen'd ear
Is 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 sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.”
― Matthew Arnold, The Poems of Matthew Arnold 1849 - 1867

“To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.”
― Matthew Arnold

“And we forget because we must”
― Matthew Arnold

“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

“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, Dover Beach and Other Poems

“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.”
― Matthew Arnold

“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.”
― Matthew Arnold

“Up the still, glistening beaches,
Up the creeks we will hie,
Over banks of bright seaweed
The 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 ever
The kings of the sea.

(from poem 'The Forsaken Merman')”
― Matthew Arnold, The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold