Matthew Arnold Quotes on Time

13 quotes

  1. With aching hands and bleeding feet We dig and heap, lay stone on stone; We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day and wish't were done. Not till the hours of light return All we have built do we discern.

  2. What shelter to grow ripe is ours? What leisure to grow wise?

  3. What actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same; that which interests them is permanent and the same also.

  4. Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head, Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.

  5. The free-thinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

  6. Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye? When did music come this way? Children dear, was it yesterday?

  7. The World in which we live and move Outlasts aversion, outlasts love: Outlasts each effort, interest, hope, Remorse, grief, joy.

  8. 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.

  9. The day in his hotness, The strife with the palm; The night in her silence, The stars in their calm.

  10. 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.

  11. He went; his piping took a troubled sound Of storms that rage outside our happy ground; He could not wait their passing, he is dead!

  12. Yes, thou art gone! and round me too the night In ever-nearing circle weaves her shade. I see her veil draw soft across the day, I feel her slowly chilling breath invade The cheek grown thin, the brown hair sprent with grey; I feel her finger light Laid pausefully upon life's headlong train; - The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew, The heart less bounding at emotion new, And hope, once crush'd, less quick to spring again.

  13. Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.

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