"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."

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More quotes from: Matthew Arnold

• "Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur. "
• "Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair. "
• "But each day brings its petty dust our soon-choked souls to fill, and we forget ..."
• "Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern. "
• "Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. "
• "For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of ..."
• "Greatness is a spiritual condition. "
• "Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties! "
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• "Journalism is literature in a hurry. "
• "Light half-believers of our casual creeds, who never deeply felt, nor clearly will d, whose ..."
• "Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with ..."
• "Protestantism has the method of Jesus with His secret too much left out of mind; ..."
• "Resolve to be thyself; and know that who finds himself, loses his misery. "
• "Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false ..."
• "The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next. "
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• "The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. "
• "The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion. "
• "The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of ..."
• "This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims. "

• "Truth sits upon the lips of dying men. "
• "Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, ..."
• "With close-lipped Patience for our only friend, Sad Patience, too near neighbor to Despair. "