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.”

“How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves!
Again — thou hearest?
Eternal passion!
Eternal pain!”

“Burke is so great because, almost alone in England, he brings thought to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought.”

“Steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection, — to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side? — nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tübingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!”

“This is the aim of the following essay: to show that, when we come to put the right construction on the Bible, we give to the Bible a real experimental basis, and keep on this basis throughout; instead of any basis of unverifiable assumption to start with, followed by a string of other unverifiable assumptions of the like kind, such as the received theology necessitates.
And this aim we cannot seek without coming in sight of another aim, too, which we have often and often pointed out, and tried to recommend: culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”

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

“Style…is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.”

“All are before me! I behold
The House, the Brotherhood austere!
— And what am I, that I am here? 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.
Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:
What dost thou in this living tomb?”

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

“One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it.”

“So, loath to suffer mute.
We, peopling the void air,
Make Gods to whom to impute
The ills we ought to bear.”

“Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.”

“The Celts certainly have it in a wonderful measure.”

“Therefore to thee it was given
Many to save with thyself;
And, at the end of thy day,
O faithful shepherd! to come,
Bringing thy sheep in thy hand.”

“What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.”

“Charge once more, then, and be dumb!
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find thy body by the wall.”

“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.”

“I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture.”

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

“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!”

“Ennobling this dull pomp, the life of kings,
By contemplation of diviner things.”

“And as long as the world lasts, all who want to make progress in righteousness will come to Israel for inspiration, as to the people who have had the sense for righteousness most glowing and strongest; and in hearing and reading the words Israel has uttered for us, carers for conduct will find a glow and a force they could find nowhere else.”

“Peace, peace is what I seek and public calm,
Endless extinction of unhappy hates.”

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

“Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.”

“I keep saying, Shakspeare, Shakspeare, you are as obscure as life is.”

“The translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author: — that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that he is eminently noble.”

“Are ye too changed, ye hills?
See, ’tis no foot of unfamiliar men
Tonight from Oxford up your pathway strays!
Here came I often, often, in old days;
Thyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then.”

“Cruel, but composed and bland,
Dumb, inscrutable and grand,
So Tiberius might have sat,
Had Tiberius been a cat.”

“The great apostle of the Philistines, Lord Macaulay”