Quote of the Day (Matthew Arnold, on Being Yourself)

"Resolve to be thyself; and know that he,
Who finds himself, loses his misery!"—English critic and poet Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), “Self-Dependence,” in The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (1897)

Quote of the Day (Matthew Arnold, on ‘The Only Secret of Style’)

“People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.” —English critic-poet Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), quoted in G. W. E. Russell, Collections and Recollections (1904)

Quote of the Day (Matthew Arnold, on Self-Knowledge)

“O air-born voice! long since, severely clear,
A cry like thine in mine own heart I hear:
‘Resolve to be thyself; and know that he,
Who finds himself, loses his misery!’"—English poet-critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), “Self-Dependence,” from The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 1840-1867 (1909)

Quote of the Day (Matthew Arnold, on the Tone of His Time—and Ours)

“But we, brought forth and rear’d in hours 

Of change, alarm, surprise—

What shelter to grow ripe is ours?

 What leisure to grow wise?”— English poet-critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), “Stanzas in Memory of the Author of Obermann” (1852)

Quote of the Day (Matthew Arnold, on Living ‘Light in the Spring’)

“Is it so small a thing

 To have enjoy'd the sun,

 To have lived light in the spring,

 To have loved, to have thought, to have done.” —British poet-critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), “From the Hymn of Empedocles” (1852)

Quote of the Day (Matthew Arnold, on Poetry)

“We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.” —English poet-critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), “The Study of Poetry” (1880)

Quote of the Day (Matthew Arnold, on Love in a World of Uncertainty)

"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."—Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”