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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.

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
Nations
Ideals
Freedom
Service
Composing
Free
Activity
Numerous
Individual
Ordinary
Solely
Great
Truly
Employed
Men
Higher
Ideal
Numbers
Individuals
Taken
Active

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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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Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.
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Religion is ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling
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For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.
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Truth sits upon the lips of dying men, And falsehood, while I lived, was far from mine.
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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.
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Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
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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.
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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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There is no better motto which it [culture] can have than these words of Bishop Wilson, To make reason and the will of God prevail.
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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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Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye.
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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.
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Thought and science follow their own law of development they are slowly elaborated in the growth and forward pressure of humanity, in what Shakespeare calls ...The prophetic soul, Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
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Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.
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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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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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Force and right are the governors of this world force till right is ready.
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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.
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The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
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