Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. – Matthew Arnold
To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive. – 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
Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore. – 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
Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away. – Matthew Arnold
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things. – Matthew Arnold
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties! – Matthew Arnold
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. – 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
The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion. – 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
Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge. – 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
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
Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it. – Matthew Arnold