Quote

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

More quotes by Matthew Arnold

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Culture is properly described as the love of perfection it is a study of perfection.
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Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
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Ah! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.
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O strong soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? For that force, Surely, has not been left vain!
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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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Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
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They... who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
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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.
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Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye Forever doth accompany mankind, Hath look'd on no religion scornfully That men did ever find.
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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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Mind is a light which the Gods mock us with, To lead those false who trust it.
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Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.
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It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.
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All the live murmur of a summer's day.
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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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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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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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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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Physician of the Iron Age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear -- And struck his finger on the place, And said -- Thou ailest here, and here.
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