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The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.... He who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and the will of God prevail.

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
Perfection
Works
United
Light
Reason
Make
Prevail
Sweetness
Pursuit

More quotes by Matthew Arnold

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The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay ... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.
Matthew Arnold
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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.
Matthew Arnold
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The heart less bounding at emotion new, The hope, once crushed, less quick to spring again.
Matthew Arnold
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For poetry the idea is everything the rest is a world of illusion.
Matthew Arnold
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Religion is ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling
Matthew Arnold
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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.
Matthew Arnold
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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?
Matthew Arnold
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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.
Matthew Arnold
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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.
Matthew Arnold
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Truth sits upon the lips of dying men, And falsehood, while I lived, was far from mine.
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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The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.
Matthew Arnold
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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.
Matthew Arnold
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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.
Matthew Arnold
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Calm soul of all things! make it mine To feel, amid the city's jar, That there abides a peace of thine, Man did not make, and cannot mar! The will to neither strive nor cry, The power to feel what others give! Calm, calm me more! nor let me die Before I have begun to live.
Matthew Arnold
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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.
Matthew Arnold
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Once read thy own breast right, And thou hast done with fears.
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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All the live murmur of a summer's day.
Matthew Arnold
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The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
Matthew Arnold