English poet & critic (1822-1888)
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
Literature & Dogma
The word "God" is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, as a not fully grasped object of the speaker's consciousness -- a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Literature and Dogma
The seeds of god-like power are in us still;
Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will!
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Written in Emerson's Essays"
Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Culture and Anarchy
But thou, my son, study to make prevail
One colour in thy life, the hue of truth.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Merope
I knew the mass of men conceal'd
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"The Buried Life"
Calm soul of all things! make it mine
To feel, amid the city's jar,
That there abides a peace of thine,
Man did not make, and cannot mar.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Lines Written in Kensington Gardens"
Yes: in the sea of life enisl'd,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"To Marguerite, in Returning a Volume of the Letters of Ortis"
Fate gave, what Chance shall not control,
His sad lucidity of soul.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Resignation"