Matthew Arnold World Quotations

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

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.

I am bound by my own definition of criticism : a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.

The world hath failed to impart the joy our youth forebodes; failed to fill up the void which in our breasts we bear.

Man errs not that he deems His welfare his true aim, He errs because he dreams The world does but exist that welfare to bestow.

To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.

One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class.

Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is ready.

Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born.

If there ever comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a force such as the world has never known.

Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.

It is - last stage of all When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man