8 Matthew Arnold Quotes on Wisdom

Matthew Arnold quotes on wisdom

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

32. It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.

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.

113. Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.

118. It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life - to the question: How to live.

123. The pursuit of the perfect, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.

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.