12 Matthew Arnold Quotes on Truth

Matthew Arnold quotes on truth

13. And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well - but 'tis not true!

22. Truth sits upon the lips of dying men, And falsehood, while I lived, was far from mine.

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.

38. Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel - below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.

53. Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.

81. I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.

85. On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.

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.

97. Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

99. Let the long contention cease! Geese are swans, and swans are geese.

121. To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.

124. Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why, then, should we desire to be deceived?'

     Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.