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

It is so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done.

Matthew Arnold

Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.

Matthew Arnold

Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.

Matthew Arnold

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.

Matthew Arnold

To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.

Matthew Arnold

And we forget because we must and not because we will.

Matthew Arnold

Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.

Matthew Arnold

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.

Matthew Arnold

France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.

Matthew Arnold

Greatness is a spiritual condition.

Matthew Arnold

Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.

Matthew Arnold

Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Matthew Arnold

Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.

Matthew Arnold

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

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold

Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.

Matthew Arnold

Spare me the whispering, crowded room, the friends who come and gape and go, the ceremonious air of gloom – all, which makes death a hideous show.

Matthew Arnold

Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.

Matthew Arnold