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For eager teachers seized my youth, pruned my faith and trimmed my fire. Showed me the high, white star of truth, there bade me gaze and there aspire.

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
Stars
Gaze
High
Showed
Faith
Aspire
White
Teachers
Pruned
Truth
Star
Bade
Youth
Trimmed
Teacher
Seized
Fire
Eager

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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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I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.
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The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
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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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The eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness.
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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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Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows Like the wave Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men. Love tends life a little grace, A few sad smiles and then, Both are laid in one cold place, In the grave.
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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.
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Creep into thy narrow bed, Creep, and let no more be said!
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We, peopling the void air, Make Gods to whom to impute The ills we ought to bear With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily.
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Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
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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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What is it to grow old? Is it to lose the glory of the form, The lustre of the eye? Is it for Beauty to forego her wreath? Yes but not this alone.
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Religion--that voice of the deepest human experience.
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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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The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
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And we forget because we must and not because we will.
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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.
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