Quote

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.

Matthew Arnold

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Life
Plain
Like
Leaves
Pass
Nears
Sea
Driftwood
Ocean
Meets
Meet
Boundless
Upon
Spares
Men
Alas

More quotes by Matthew Arnold

Image
Truth illuminates and gives joy and it is by the bond of joy, not of pleasure, that men's spirits are indissolubly held.
Matthew Arnold
Image
Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes Ah, would that I did too!
Matthew Arnold
Image
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men, And falsehood, while I lived, was far from mine.
Matthew Arnold
Image
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
Matthew Arnold
Image
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.
Matthew Arnold
Image
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.... He who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and the will of God prevail.
Matthew Arnold
Image
All the live murmur of a summer's day.
Matthew Arnold
Image
If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.
Matthew Arnold
Image
Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, Where the winds are all asleep Where the spent lights quiver and gleam Where the salt weed sways in the stream.
Matthew Arnold
Image
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
Image
Alas! is even love too weak To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Matthew Arnold
Image
I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.
Matthew Arnold
Image
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.
Matthew Arnold
Image
I knew the mass of men conceal'd Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd They would by other men be met With blank indifference.
Matthew Arnold
Image
Religion is ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling
Matthew Arnold
Image
The need of expansion is as genuine an instinct in man as the need in a plant for the light, or the need in man himself for going upright. The love of liberty is simply the instinct in man for expansion.
Matthew Arnold
Image
We must hold fast to the austere but true doctrine as to what really governs politics and saves or destroys states. Having in mind things true, things elevated, things just, things pure, things amiable, things of good report having these in mind, studying and loving these, is what saves states.
Matthew Arnold
Image
Not deep the poet sees, but wide.
Matthew Arnold
Image
Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one
Matthew Arnold
Image
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