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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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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
Upon
Historian
Found
Depend
Truth
Brings
Thing
Depends
Every
Level
Unbeliever
Men
Writer
Unbelievers
Levels
Heroism
Common
Mediocrity

More quotes by Matthew Arnold

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Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Matthew Arnold
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Not deep the poet sees, but wide.
Matthew Arnold
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Creep into thy narrow bed, Creep, and let no more be said!
Matthew Arnold
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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.
Matthew Arnold
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And we forget because we must and not because we will.
Matthew Arnold
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Truth illuminates and gives joy and it is by the bond of joy, not of pleasure, that men's spirits are indissolubly held.
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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.
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Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye.
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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.
Matthew Arnold
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I am bound by my own definition of criticism : a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.
Matthew Arnold
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Tis not to see the world As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes, And heart profoundly stirred And weep, and feel the fullness of the past, The years that are not more.
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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Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.
Matthew Arnold
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Religion--that voice of the deepest human experience.
Matthew Arnold
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God's Wisdom and God's Goodness!--Ah, but fools Mis-define thee, till God knows them no more. Wisdom and goodness they are God!--what schools Have yet so much as heard this simpler lore. This no Saint preaches, and this no Church rules: 'Tis in the desert, now and heretofore.
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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However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications.
Matthew Arnold