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Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.

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
Personality
Becoming
Growing
Culture
Character
Conceives
Resting
Perfection

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Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.
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Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
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Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes Ah, would that I did too!
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With aching hands and bleeding feet We dig and heap, lay stone on stone We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day, and wish 'twere done. Not till the hours of light return All we have built do we discern.
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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.
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The eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness.
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And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and hustle by And never once possess our soul Before we die.
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Religion is ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling
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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.
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In our English popular religion the common conception of a future state of bliss is that of ... a kind of perfected middle-class home, with labour ended, the table spread, goodness all around, the lost ones restored, hymnody incessant.
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The world hath failed to impart the joy our youth forebodes failed to fill up the void which in our breasts we bear.
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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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The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay ... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.
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Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.
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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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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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Religion--that voice of the deepest human experience.
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But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.
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Grey time-worn marbles Hold the pure Muses. In their cool gallery, By yellow Tiber, They still look fair.
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O strong soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? For that force, Surely, has not been left vain!
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