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America
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Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.
-Matthew Arnold
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Authors & Writing
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People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is. Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.
-Matthew Arnold
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Belief
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Light half-believers of our casual creeds, who never deeply felt, nor clearly will d, whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds, whose vague resolves never have been fulfilled.
-Matthew Arnold
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Cats
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Cruel, but composed and bland,
Dumb, inscrutable and grand,
So Tiberius might have sat,
Had Tiberius been a cat.
-Matthew Arnold
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Christianity
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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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City Life, Cities
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And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty's heightening...
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/109.html
-Matthew Arnold, Thyrsis: A Monody, to Commemorate the Author's Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough
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Class
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If experience has established any one thing in this world, it has established this: that it is well for any great class and description of men in society to be able to say for itself what it wants, and not to have other classes, the so-called educated and intelligent classes, acting for it as its proctors, and supposed to understand its wants and to provide for them. A class of men may often itself not either fully understand its wants, or adequately express them; but it has a nearer interest and a more sure diligence in the matter than any of its proctors, and therefore a better chance of success.
-Matthew Arnold
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The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.
-Matthew Arnold
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Culture
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Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.
-Matthew Arnold
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Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.
-Matthew Arnold
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Death
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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.
-Matthew Arnold
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Dreams
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Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.
-Matthew Arnold
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Education
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Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
-Matthew Arnold
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Goals
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Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.
-Matthew Arnold
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Greatness & Great Things
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Greatness is a spiritual condition.
-Matthew Arnold
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Growth
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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.
-Matthew Arnold
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Hope
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Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.
-Matthew Arnold
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Journalism
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Journalism is literature in a hurry.
-Matthew Arnold
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Light
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The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
-Matthew Arnold
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Memory
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But each day brings its petty dust our soon-choked souls to fill, and we forget because we must, and not because we will.
-Matthew Arnold
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Men
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Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
-Matthew Arnold
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Modern, Modernism
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This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.
-Matthew Arnold
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Past, the
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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, Growing Old
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Patience
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With close-lipped Patience for our only friend, Sad Patience, too near neighbor to Despair.
-Matthew Arnold
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Religion
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The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
-Matthew Arnold
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Books by and about Matthew Arnold