C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Matthew Arnold

Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye

Forever doth accompany mankind,

Hath look’d on no religion scornfully

That men did ever find.

Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows

Like the wave;

Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.

Love lends life a little grace,

A few sad smiles; and then,

Both are laid in one cold place,

In the grave.

No, no! The energy of life may be

Kept on after the grave, but not begun;

And he who flagg’d not in the earthly strife,

From strength to strength advancing—only he

His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,

Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.

Now, the whole world hears

Or shall hear,—surely shall hear, at the last,

Though men delay, and doubt, and faint, and fail,—

That promise faithful:—“Fear not, little flock!

It is your Father’s will and joy, to give

To you, the Kingdom”!

Odin, thou whirlwind, what a threat is this

Thou threatenest what transcends thy might, even thine,

For of all powers the mightiest far art thou,

Lord over men on earth, and Gods in Heaven;

Yet even from thee thyself hath been withheld

One thing—to undo what thou thyself hast ruled.

On one she smiled, and he was blest;

She smiles elsewhere—we make a din!

But ’twas not love which heaved her breast,

Fair child!—it was the bliss within.

Others abide our question. Thou art free.

We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still,

Out-topping knowledge.

What is it to grow old?

Is it to lose the glory of the form,

The lustre of the eye?

Is it for Beauty to forego her wreath?

Yes; but not this alone.

Youth dreams a bliss on this side death.

It dreams a rest, if not more deep,

More grateful than this marble sleep;

It hears a voice within it tell:

Calm’s not life’s crown, though calm is well.

’Tis all perhaps which man acquires,

But ’tis not what our youth desires.

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 looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion—the passion for sweetness and light. It has one even yet greater, the passion for making them all prevail. It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindly masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light.

Genius is mainly an affair of energy.

How many minds—almost all the great ones—were formed in secrecy and solitude!

It does not try to reach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords of its own. It seeks to do away with classes, to make the best that has been taught and known in the world current everywhere, to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely—nourished, and not bound by them.

Men of culture are the true apostles of equality.

Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets by expressing, with magical felicity, the physiognomy and movements of the outward world; and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man’s moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretative both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity.

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

Religion—that voice of the deepest human experience.

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

The imitators of Shakespeare, fixing their attention on his wonderful power of expression, have directed their imitation to this.

Truth illuminates and gives joy; and it is by the band of joy, not of pleasure, that men’s spirits are indissolubly held.

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