12 Matthew Arnold Quotes on Literature

Matthew Arnold quotes on literature

1. I keep saying, Shakspeare, Shakspeare, you are as obscure as life is.

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.

56. Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron's struggle cease.

57. Physician of the Iron Age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear - And struck his finger on the place, And said - Thou ailest here, and here.

58. Wordsworth has gone from us - and ye, Ah, may ye feel his voice as we! He too upon a wintry clime Had fallen - on this iron time Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears.

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.

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

76. 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.

86. The great apostle of the Philistines, Lord Macaulay.

115. The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.

116. Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.

119. The crown of literature is poetry.

     Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.