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Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together, it suggests, however indirectly, high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the emotion so helpful in making principles operative.

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
Truth
Emotion
Inspires
Beget
Doe
Principles
Tends
Operative
Character
Beauty
Helpful
Indirectly
Together
High
Noble
Alliance
Soul
Literature
Tend
Undoubtedly
Good
Making
Inspire
Alliances
Love
Action
However
Begets
Form
Poetry
Suggests

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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 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.
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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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The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.
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Weary of myself, and sick of asking What I am, and what I ought to be, At this vessel's prow I stand, which bears me Forwards, forwards, o'er the starlit sea.
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Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.
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How many minds--almost all the great ones--were formed in secrecy and solitude!
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Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life.
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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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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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The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience .
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Culture is properly described as the love of perfection it is a study of perfection.
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Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one
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To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
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France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.
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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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The heart less bounding at emotion new, The hope, once crushed, less quick to spring again.
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Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.
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Religion--that voice of the deepest human experience.
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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.
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