8 Matthew Arnold Quotes on Education

Matthew Arnold quotes on education

25. For rigorous teachers seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire, Show'd me the high white star of Truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire.

37. The power of the Latin classic is in character, that of the Greek is in beauty. Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.

73. The translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author:-that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that he is eminently noble.

80. 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.

93. Why faintest thou! I wander'd till I died. Roam on! The light we sought is shining still. Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill, Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside.

106. 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.

112. The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.

122. 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.'