Matthew Arnold Life Quotations

Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration.

(Poetry) a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty

Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole: / The mellow glory of the Attic stage.

And then he thinks he knows The hills where his life rose, And the sea where it goes

In his poetry as well as in his life Shelley was indeed 'a beautiful and ineffectual angel', beating in the void his luminous wings in vain

Dreams dawn and fly: friends smile and die, Like spring flowers. Our vaunted life is one long funeral. Men dig graves, with bitter tears, For their dead hopes; and all, Mazed with doubts, and sick with fears, Count the hours.

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

Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

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

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.

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.

Saw life steadily and saw it whole.

Alas! is even love too weak To unlock the heart, and let it speak? Are even lovers powerless to reveal To one another what indeed they feel? I knew the mass of men conceal'd Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd They would by other men be met With blank indifference, or with blame reproved; I knew they lived and moved Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest Of men, and alien to themselves - and yet The same heart beats in every human breast!

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?