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The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
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
Perfection
Light
Perfectionism
Perfectionist
Sweetness
Pursuit
More quotes by Matthew Arnold
Youth dreams a bliss on this side of death. It dreams a rest, if not more deep, More grateful than this marble sleep It hears a voice within it tell: Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well. 'Tis all perhaps which man acquires, But 'tis not what our youth desires.
Matthew Arnold
The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere to the subtle, contriving head.
Matthew Arnold
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.
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.
Matthew Arnold
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
Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.
Matthew Arnold
Force and right are the governors of this world force till right is ready.
Matthew Arnold
Six years-six little years-six drops of time.
Matthew Arnold
For poetry the idea is everything the rest is a world of illusion.
Matthew Arnold
Hither and thither spins The wind-borne mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole.
Matthew Arnold
Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.
Matthew Arnold
We do not what we ought What we ought not, we do And lean upon the thought That chance will bring us through But our own acts, for good or ill, are mightier powers.
Matthew Arnold
They... who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
Matthew Arnold
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain cradle in Pamere, A foiled circuitous wanderertill at last The longed-for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home of waters opens, bright And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.
Matthew Arnold
One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class.
Matthew Arnold
For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.
Matthew Arnold
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.
Matthew Arnold
Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.
Matthew Arnold
Sanity -- that is the great virtue of the ancient literature the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.
Matthew Arnold
All the live murmur of a summer's day.
Matthew Arnold
