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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.

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
Facts
Illusion
Part
Poetry
Today
Divine
Ideas
Emotion
Everything
Rest
World
Religion
Attaches
Fact
Strongest
Idea
Unconscious

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Now the great winds shoreward blow Now the salt tides seaward flow Now the wild white horses play Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
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Eutrapelia . A happy and gracious flexibility, Pericles calls this quality of the Athenians...lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice and freedom from stiffness, openness of mind, amiability of manners.
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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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Nature's great law, and the law of all men's minds? To its own impulse every creature stirs: Live by thy light, and Earth will live by hers.
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Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.
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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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The hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and, pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits, this good fellow carried hidden in his nature, apparently, something destined to develop into a necessity for humane letters.
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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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If Paris that brief flight allow, My humble tomb explore! It bears: Eternity, be thou My refuge! and no more.
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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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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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France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.
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Religion--that voice of the deepest human experience.
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The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.
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A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time.
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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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But thou, my son, study to make prevail One colour in thy life, the hue of truth.
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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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Hither and thither spins The wind-borne mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole.
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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.
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