28 quotes
It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.
We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.
The Liberal Imagination (1950)
No literature has ever been so shockingly personal as that of our time — it asks every question that is forbidden by polite society.
The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.
The Liberal Imagination (1950)
Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth.
Sincerity and Authenticity (1972)
After all, no one is ever taken in by the happy ending, but we are often divinely fuddled by the tragic curtain.
Matthew Arnold (1939)
The spectator, we might put it, contracts by infection the characteristic disease of the actor, the attenuation of selfhood that results from impersonation.
Sincerity and Authenticity (1972)
The factory was not made for man but man for the factory.
Matthew Arnold (1939)
We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.
Notebook entry (1948)
Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.
The Liberal Imagination (1950)
There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.
The Liberal Imagination (1950)
The poet… may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
The Liberal Imagination (1950)
We have all in some degree become anarchistic.
The Portable Matthew Arnold (1949)
Even the nonreligious may exercise aesthetic judgment in matters of religion, and indeed our age has given the unbelieving a sophisticated taste in religious literature.
The Portable Matthew Arnold (1949)
Freud … showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty.
Beyond Culture (1965)
If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeoisie itself.
Notebook entry (1951)
At the bottom of at least popular Marxism there has always been a kind of disgust with humanity as it is and a perfect faith in humanity as it is to be.
The writer serves his daemon and his subject. And the democracy that does not know that the daemon and the subject must be served is not, in any ideal sense of the word, a democracy at all.
The Liberal Imagination (1950)
It is one thing, then, to say, "The Bible contains the religion revealed by God," and quite another to say, "Whatever is contained in the Bible is religion, and was revealed by God." If the latter be accepted, metaphor and allegory become literal statements and the errors and absurdities of bibliolatry follow.
Matthew Arnold (1939)
Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.
Notebook entry (1946)