237 quotes
Nature, with equal mind,
Sees all her sons at play
Sees man control the wind,
The wind sweep man away.
Empedocles on Etna (1852)
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.
Thyrsis (1866)
Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.
Culture and Anarchy (1869)
Hither and thither spins
The wind-borne mirroring soul,
A thousand glimpses wins,
And never sees a whole.
Empedocles on Etna (1852)
Peace, peace is what I seek, and public calm,
Endless extinction of unhappy hates.
Merope (1858)
Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.
Culture and Anarchy (1869)
The free-thinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
God and the Bible (1875)
And youth and bloom, and this delightful world.
Sohrab and Rustum (1853)
Because thou must not dream, thou needst not then despair!
Empedocles on Etna (1852)
The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.
Culture and Anarchy (1869)
The same heart beats in every human breast!
With women the heart argues, not the mind.
Merope (1858)
Calm soul of all things! make it mine
To feel, amid the city’s jar,
That there abides a peace of thine,
Man did not make, and cannot mar.
All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,
Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.
The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849)
The sophist sneers: Fool, take
Thy pleasure, right or wrong!
The pious wail: Forsake
A world these sophists throng!
Be neither saint- nor sophist-led, but be a man.
Empedocles on Etna (1852)
Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
Culture and Anarchy (1869)
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.
Culture and Anarchy (1869)
The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.
Culture and Anarchy (1869)
Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.
Literature and Dogma (1873)
Weep bitterly over the dead, for he is worthy, and then comfort thyself; drive heaviness away: thou shall not do him good, but hurt thyself.
Matthew Arnold's Notebooks (1902)