6 Matthew Arnold Quotes on Critique

Matthew Arnold quotes on critique

24. Sanity - that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.

27. The kings of modern thought are dumb.

75. The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.

107. Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

113. Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.

125. But whatever the deity which satisfied Arnold's personal experience may have been, the religion which he gives us in Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible is neither Deism nor bare Pan-Deism, but a diluted Positivism. As an ethical system it is in theory admirable, but its positive value is in the highest degree questionable. Pascal's judgment upon the God who emerged from the philosophical investigations of Rene Descartes was that He was a God who was unnecessary. And one may with even greater truth say that the man who is able to receive and live by the religion which Arnold offers him is no longer in need of its help and stimulus. To be able to appreciate an ethical idealism a man must himself be already an ethical idealist.