Matthew Arnold

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.

Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

The free-thinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.

Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel — below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.

The power of the Latin classic is in character, that of the Greek is in beauty. Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.

The Celts certainly have it in a wonderful measure.

Style...is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.

I will not say that thou wast true, Yet let me say that thou wast fair! And they that lovely face who view, They should not ask if truth be there.

Ere the parting hour go by, Quick, thy tablets, Memory!

Nor bring, to see me cease to live, Some doctor full of phrase and fame, To shake his sapient head and give The ill he cannot cure a name.

The East bowed low before the blast, In patient deep disdain; She let the legions thunder past, And plunged in thought again.

Was Christ a man like us? — Ah! let us try If we then, too, can be such men as he!

Cruel, but composed and bland, Dumb, inscrutable and grand, So Tiberius might have sat, Had Tiberius been a cat.

It is — last stage of all — When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves, To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.

It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.

Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an …

With women the heart argues, not the mind.

Peace, peace is what I seek, and public calm, Endless extinction of unhappy hates.

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

But each day brings its petty dust Our soon-chok’d souls to fill, And we forget because we must, And not because we will.

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 longing of the day.

Their ineffectual feuds and feeble hates, Shadows of hates, but they distress them still.

How fair a lot to fill Is left to each man still.