"If what distinguishes the greatest poets is their powerful and profound application of ideas to life, which surely no good critic will deny, then to prefix to the word ideas here the term moral makes hardly any difference, because human life itself is in so preponderating a degree moral. It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life — to the question, How to live. Morals are often treated in a narrow and false fashion, they are bound up with systems of thought and belief which have had their day, they are fallen into the hands of pedants and professional dealers, they grow tiresome to some of us. We find attraction, at times, even in a poetry of revolt against them; in a poetry which might take for its motto Omar Khayam's words: "Let us make up in the tavern for the time which we have wasted in the mosque." Or we find attractions in a poetry indifferent to them, in a poetry where the contents may be what they will, but where the form is studied and exquisite. We delude ourselves in either case; and the best cure for our delusion is to let our minds rest upon that great and inexhaustible word life, until we learn to enter into its meaning. A poetry of revolt against moral ideas is a poetry of revolt against life; a poetry of indifference towards moral ideas is a poetry of indifference towards life."

"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."

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

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

"The crown of literature is poetry."

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

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

"[W]ithout order there can be no society, and without society there can be no human perfection."

"as the vast tide Of the bright rocking Ocean sets to shore At the full moon."

"Truth sits upon the lips of dying men, And falsehood, while I lived, was far from mine."

"Girl! nimble with thy feet, not with thy hands! Curl'd minion, dancer, coiner of sweet words!"

"For a cloud Grew suddenly in Heaven, and darked the sun."

"and all the pleasant life they led, They three, in that long-distant summer-time — The castle and the dewy woods, and hunt And hound, and morn on those delightful hills In Ader-baijan."

"his own early youth, And all its bounding rapture"

"his head droop’d low, His limbs grew slack; motionless, white, he lay—"

"And youth and bloom, and this delightful world."

"Forgive me, masters of the mind! At whose behest I long ago So much unlearnt, so much resign'd — I come not here to be your foe! I seek these anchorites, not in ruth, To curse and to deny your truth; Not as their friend, or child, I speak! But as, on some far northern strand, Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek In pity and mournful awe might stand Before some fallen Runic stone — For both were faiths, and both are gone."

"Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head, Like these, on earth I wait forlorn."

"But — if you cannot give us ease — Last of the race of them who grieve Here leave us to die out with these Last of the people who believe! Silent, while years engrave the brow; Silent — the best are silent now. Achilles ponders in his tent, The kings of modern thought are dumb, Silent they are though not content, And wait to see the future come. They have the grief men had of yore, But they contend and cry no more."

"What helps it now, that Byron bore, With haughty scorn which mock'd the smart, Through Europe to the Ætolian shore The pageant of his bleeding heart? That thousands counted every groan, And Europe made his woe her own?"

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

"On the mind of an adversary one never makes the faintest impression."

"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."

"There is the world of ideas and there is the world of practice; the French are often for suppressing the one and the English the other; but neither is to be suppressed."

"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!"

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

"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."

"The great apostle of the Philistines, Lord Macaulay"

"The signal-elm, that looks on Ilsley Downs, The Vale, the three lone weirs, the youthful Thames."

"And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening."

"So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry, From the wet field, through the vext garden-trees, Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze: The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I!"

"Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,"

"Why faintest thou! I wander’d till I died. Roam on! The light we sought is shining still. Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill, Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside."

"The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!"

"The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world."

"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."

"They out-talk’d thee, hiss’d thee, tore thee. Better men fared thus before thee; Fired their ringing shot and pass’d, Hotly charged — and broke at last."

"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."

"O strong soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? For that force, Surely, has not been left vain!"

"What is the course of the life Of mortal men on the earth?— Most men eddy about Here and there—eat and drink, Chatter and love and hate, Gather and squander, are raised Aloft, are hurl’d in the dust, Striving blindly, achieving Nothing; and, then they die— Perish; and no one asks Who or what they have been, More than he asks what waves In the moonlit solitudes mild Of the midmost Ocean, have swell’d, Foam’d for a moment, and gone."

"... the salt blue sea."

"Who art thou then, that canst so touch my soul?"

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

"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."

"However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications."

"Mat. Arnold is a great loss to me. He was one of my firmest and dearest and best friends. Every year I had a higher opinion of him. No one ever united so much kindness and lightheartedness with so much strength. He was the most sensible man of genius whom I have ever known and the most free from personality, and his mind was very far from being exhausted."

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

"English civilization — the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society — that is what interests me."

"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."

"For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry."