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It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

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Sep 06, 2025

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He spoke, and loos’d our heart in tears. He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth.
Matthew Arnold

Quote Author: Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822 - 15 April 1888) was an English poet and cultural critic, who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator.

Other Matthew Arnold Quotes

Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

Still standing for some false impossible shore.

Go, for they call you, Shepherd, from the hill.

This strange disease of modern life.

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.

Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask: Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.

Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.

The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.

We do not what we ought; What we ought not, we do; And lean upon the thought That chance will bring us through; But our own acts, for good or ill, are mightier powers.

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.

But so many books thou readest, But so many schemes thou breedest, But so many wishes feedest, That thy poor head almost turns.

Was Christ a man like us?—Ah! let us try If we then, too, can be such men as he!

Conduct is three-fourths of life and its largest concern.

I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.

One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common — discontent.

But each day brings its petty dust Our soon-chok'd souls to fill, And we forget because we must, And not because we will.

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is ready.

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.

To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.

The will is free; Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful; The seeds of godlike power are in us still; Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will!

For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Culture is 'to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.'

‘He knows’, says Hebraism, ‘his Bible!’—whenever we hear this said, we may, without any elaborate defense of culture, content ourselves with answering simply: ‘No man, who knows nothing else, knows even his Bible.’

Nature’s great law, and the law of all men’s minds? To its own impulse every creature stirs: Live by thy light, and Earth will live by hers.

Too fast we live, too much are tried, Too harass’d, to attain Wordsworth’s sweet calm, or Goethe’s wide And luminous view to gain.

The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

When Byron’s eyes were shut in death, We bow’d our head and held our breath. He taught us little; but our soul Had felt his like a thunder roll.... We watch’d the fount of fiery life Which serv’d for that Titanic life.

He spoke, and loos’d our heart in tears. He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth.

Time may restore us in his course Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force: But where will Europe’s latter hour Again find Wordsworth’s healing power?

His expression may often be called bald ... but it is bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.

Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power.

We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides, The spirit bloweth and is still, In mystery our soul abides: But tasks in hours of insight will’d Can be through hours of gloom fulfill’d.

With close-lipp'd Patience for our only friend, Sad Patience, too near neighbour to Despair.

All this I bear, for, what I seek, I know: Peace, peace is what I seek, and public calm: Endless extinction of unhappy hates.

He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the 'Iliad' itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.

Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children of the light.

Philistinism!—We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.

Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.

Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius; therefore a nation whose spirit is characterized by energy may well be imminent in poetry — and we have Shakespeare.

And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and hustle by; And never once possess our soul Before we die.

Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did too!

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.'

Resolve to find thyself; and to know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.

He bears the seed of ruin in himself.

Resolve to be thyself: and know that he Who finds himself loses his misery.

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?

Wandering between two worlds,—one dead, The other powerless to be born.

This strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry.

The kings of modern thought are dumb.

A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time.

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.

Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.

With women the heart argues, not the mind.

One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class.

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