Quotes
Quotes - Arnold
Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge.
Strew on her roses, roses,
And never a spray of yew!
In quiet she reposes;
Ah, would that I did too!
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.
Time may restore us in his course
Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force;
But where will Europe's latter hour
Again find Wordsworth's healing power?
Wandering between two worlds,--one dead,
The other powerless to be born.
The kings of modern thought are dumb.
Calm Soul of all things! make it mine
To feel, amid the city's jar,
That there abides a place of thine,
Man did not make, and can not mar.
We, in some unknown Power's employ,
Move on a rigorous line;
Can neither, when we will, enjoy,
Nor, when we will, resign.
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
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.
This strange disease of modern life.
Ennobling this dull pomp, the life of kings,
By contemplation of diviner things.
Yet they, believe me, who await
No gifts from chance, have conquered Fate.
Let the long contention cease!
Geese are swans and swans are geese!
The same heart beats in every human breast.
To thee only God granted
A heart ever new:
To all always open;
To all always true.
Radiant with ardour divine!
Beacons of Hope ye appear!
Languor is not in your heart,
Weakness is not in your word,
Weariness not on your brow.
Peace, peace is what I seek and public calm,
Endless extinction of unhappy hates.
With women the heart argues, not the mind.
We do not what we ought,
What we ought not, we do,
And lean upon the thought
That Chance will bring us through.
The will is free;
Strong is the soul, and wise and beautiful;
The seeds of godlike power are in us still;
Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will!
The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.
The pursuit of the perfect, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
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."
Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the children of the light.
