Frases de Matthew Arnold

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“Para criar uma obra-prima da literatura, dois poderes precisam estar presentes: o poder do homem e o poder do momento.”

“Apenas aqueles que nada esperam do azar são donos do destino.”

“A cultura é a busca da nossa perfeição total mediante a tentativa de conhecer o melhor possível o que foi dito ou pensado no mundo, em todas as questões que nos dizem respeito.”

“The East bowed low before the blast,
In patient deep disdain;
She let the legions thunder past,
And plunged in thought again.”

“But each day brings its petty dust
Our soon-chok’d souls to fill,
And we forget because we must,
And not because we will.”

“Critical power…tends to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces; to make the best ideas prevail.”

“It is — last stage of all —
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.”

“This truth—to prove, and make thine own:
‘Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.”

“The will is free;
Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful;
The seeds of god-like power are in us still;
Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will!”

“Strew on her roses, roses,
And never a spray of yew.
In quiet she reposes:
Ah! would that I did too.”

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

“What shelter to grow ripe is ours?
What leisure to grow wise?”

“Homer is rapid in his movement, Homer is plain in his words and style, Homer is simple in his ideas, Homer is noble in his manner. Cowper renders him ill because he is slow in his movement, and elaborate in his style; Pope renders him ill because he is artificial both in his style and in his words; Chapman renders him ill because he is fantastic in his ideas; Mr. Newman renders him ill because he is odd in his words and ignoble in his manner.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We do not what we ought,
What we ought not, we do,
And lean upon the thought
That chance will bring us through.”

“Yet they, believe me, who await
No gifts from Chance, have conquer’d Fate.”

“Oh, hide me in your gloom profound,
Ye solemn seats of holy pain!
Take me, cowl'd forms, and fence me round,
Till I possess my soul again;
Till free my thoughts before me roll,
Not chafed by hourly false control!”

“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?”

“Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.”

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

“Such a price
The Gods exact for song;
To become what we sing.”

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

“That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.”

“The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.”

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

“Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration.”

“Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.”

“Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.”

“Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more,
And in that more lie all his hopes of good.”

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

“Calm soul of all things! make it mine
To feel, amid the city’s jar,
That there abides a peace of thine,
Man did not make, and cannot mar.”