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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No, no! The energy of life may be Kept on after the grave, but not begun And he who flagg'd not in the earthly strife, From strength to strength advancing--only he His soul well-knit, and all his battles won, Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.
Matthew Arnold
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Creep into thy narrow bed, Creep, and let no more be said!
Matthew Arnold
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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.
Matthew Arnold
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Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
Matthew Arnold
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Mind is a light which the Gods mock us with, To lead those false who trust it.
Matthew Arnold
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Six years-six little years-six drops of time.
Matthew Arnold
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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
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With aching hands and bleeding feet We dig and heap, lay stone on stone We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day, and wish 'twere done. Not till the hours of light return All we have built do we discern.
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Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.
Matthew Arnold
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For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.
Matthew Arnold
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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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For science, God is simply the stream of tendency by which all things seek to fulfill the law of their being.
Matthew Arnold
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Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we, Light half-believers in our casual deeds . . . Who hesitate and falter life away, And lose tomorrow the ground won today- Ah, do not we, Wanderer, await it too?
Matthew Arnold
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Weep bitterly over the dead, for he is worthy, and then comfort thyself drive heaviness away: thou shall not do him good, but hurt thyself.
Matthew Arnold
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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.
Matthew Arnold
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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.
Matthew Arnold
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In our English popular religion the common conception of a future state of bliss is that of ... a kind of perfected middle-class home, with labour ended, the table spread, goodness all around, the lost ones restored, hymnody incessant.
Matthew Arnold
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Ah, love, let us be true To one another!
Matthew Arnold
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Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
Matthew Arnold
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The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
Matthew Arnold