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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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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
Known
Propagate
Learn
Disinterested
Thought
Endeavour
Best
Definition
World
Bound
Definitions
Bounds
Criticism

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Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.
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ForTime, not Corydon, hath conquered thee.
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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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Come, dear children, let us away Down and away below!
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Greatness is a spiritual condition.
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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.
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To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
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Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the sky, to have loved, to have thought, to have done?
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Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
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Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye.
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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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Religion is ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling
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The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are the uppermost ideas with Hebraism is conduct and obedience.Nothing can do away with this ineffaceable difference. The Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is, that they hinder right thinking the Hebrew quarrel with them is, that they hinder right acting.
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However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications.
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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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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 ordinary man taken by himself.
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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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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.
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To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.
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How many minds--almost all the great ones--were formed in secrecy and solitude!
Matthew Arnold