Matthew Arnold Quotes

• Let us reunite ourselves with our better mind and with the world through science; and let it be one of our angelic revenges on the Philistines, who among their other sins are the guilty authors of Fenian ism, to found at Oxford a chair of Celtic, and to send, through the gentle ministration of science, a message of peace to Ireland.

  Matthew Arnold

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• It is not in the outward and visible world of material life that the Celtic genius of Wales or Ireland can at this day hope to count for much; it is in the inward world of thought and science.What it has been, what is has done, what it will be or will do, as a matter of modern politics.

  Matthew Arnold

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• The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew, The heart less bounding at emotion new, And hope, once crushed, less quick to spring again.

  Matthew Arnold

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• For Time, not Cory don, hath conquered thee.

  Matthew Arnold

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• Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, Soon will the musk carnations break and swell.

  Matthew Arnold

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• So have I heard the cuckoo’s parting cry, From the wet field, through the vext garden trees, Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze: ‘The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I.’

  Matthew Arnold

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• And that sweet City with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.

  Matthew Arnold

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• The signal-elm, that looks on I lsley downs, The Vale, the three lone weirs, the youthful Thames.

  Matthew Arnold

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• The great apostle of the Philistine, Lord Macaulay.

  Matthew Arnold

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• Philistinism!—We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.

  Matthew Arnold

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• I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.

  Matthew Arnold

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• Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!…whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age…Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

  Matthew Arnold

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• Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life.

  Matthew Arnold

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• Nothing has raised more questioning among my critics than these words—noble, the grand style…I think it will be found that the grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.

  Matthew Arnold

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• [The translator] will find one English book and one only, where, as in the Iliad itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible.

  Matthew Arnold

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• Of  these two literature [French and German], as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort ; the endeavors, in all branches of knowledge—theology, philosophy, history, art, science—to see the object as in itself it really is.

  Matthew Arnold

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• Wordsworth says somewhere that wherever Virgil seems to have composed ‘with his eye on the object’, Dryden fails to render him.Homer invariably composes ‘with his eye on the object’, whether the object be moral or a material one: Pope composes with his eye on his style, into which he translates his object, whatever it is.

  Matthew Arnold

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• This truth—to prove, and make thine own:‘Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.’

  Matthew Arnold

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• What helps it now, that Byron bore, With haughty scorn which mocked the smart, Through Europe to the Aetolian shore The pageant of his bleeding heart ? That thousands counted every groan, And Europe made his woe her own?

  Matthew Arnold

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• Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With now here yet to rest my head, Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.

  Matthew Arnold

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Matthew Arnold (117)

Birth:	24th December, 1822
Death:	15th April, 1888
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Critic, Poet

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