Matthew Arnold Quotes on Culture
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The Celts certainly have it [style] in a wonderful measure.
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Eutrapelia. 'A happy and gracious flexibility,' Pericles calls this quality of the Athenians...lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice and freedom from stiffness, openness of mind, amiability of manners.
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English civilization - the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society-that is what interests me.
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What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.
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So, loath to suffer mute. We, peopling the void air, Make Gods to whom to impute The ills we ought to bear.
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O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts, was rife.
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There is the world of ideas and there is the world of practice; the French are often for suppressing the one and the English the other; but neither is to be suppressed.
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The notion of the free play of the mind upon all subjects being a pleasure in itself, being an object of desire, being an essential provider of elements without which a nation's spirit, whatever compensations it may have for them, must, in the long run, die of inanition, hardly enters into an Englishman's thoughts.
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Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the children of the light.
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The great apostle of the Philistines, Lord Macaulay.
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The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.
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Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.
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I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture.
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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.
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The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. He who works for sweetness and light, works to make reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.
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The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.
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The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.
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There is no better motto which it [culture] can have than these words of Bishop Wilson, 'To make reason and the will of God prevail.'
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The pursuit of the perfect, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.