Quotes by Matthew Arnold

• 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.
• 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.
• Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
• Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.
• Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
• To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
• The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
• The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
• It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.
• And we forget because we must and not because we will.
• Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
• Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.
• Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.
• Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
• Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
• 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.
• France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.
• Greatness is a spiritual condition.
• Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.
• Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
• The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
• Journalism is literature in a hurry.
• Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
• Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.
• Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
• Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.
• Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
• Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.
• 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.
• Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.