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Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.

Matthew Arnold

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Matthew Arnold
Age: 65 †
Born: 1822
Born: December 24
Died: 1888
Died: April 15
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
School Inspector
University Teacher
Writer
Laleham
Surrey
Study
Insists
Rather
Outward
Culture
Inward
Spirit
Condition
Mind
Perfection
Something
Circumstances
Conditions
Becoming

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Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.
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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! The will to neither strive nor cry, The power to feel what others give! Calm, calm me more! nor let me die Before I have begun to live.
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Once read thy own breast right, And thou hast done with fears.
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English civilization the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society that is what interests me.
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For science, God is simply the stream of tendency by which all things seek to fulfill the law of their being.
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The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere to the subtle, contriving head.
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Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.
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A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time.
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Like driftwood spares which meet and pass Upon the boundless ocean-plain, So on the sea of life, alas! Man nears man, meets, and leaves again.
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Protestantism has the method of Jesus with His secret too much left out of mind Catholicism has His secret with His method too much left out of mind neither has His unerring balance, His intuition, His sweet reasonableness. But both have hold of a great truth, and get from it a great power.
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Ah! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.
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What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.
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Now the great winds shoreward blow Now the salt tides seaward flow Now the wild white horses play Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
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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.
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Culture is properly described as the love of perfection it is a study of perfection.
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Truth illuminates and gives joy and it is by the bond of joy, not of pleasure, that men's spirits are indissolubly held.
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Not deep the poet sees, but wide.
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