Culture and Anarchy & Other Writings Quotes

“Culture . . . seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light...”
― Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy & Other Writings

“Culture is the most resolute enemy of anarchy, because of the great hopes and designs for the State which culture teaches us to nourish.”
― Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy & Other Writings

“No individual life can be truly prosperous, passed . . . in the midst of men who suffer.”
― Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy & Other Writings

“Socrates has drunk his hemlock and is dead; but in his own breast does not every man carry about with him a possible Socrates, in that power of a disinterested play of consciousness upon his stock notions and habits, of which this wise and admirable man gave all through his lifetime the great example, and which was the secret of his incomparable influence?”
― Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy & Other Writings

“How generally, with how many of us, are the main concerns of life limited to these two: the concern for making money, and the concern for saving our souls!”
― Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy & Other Writings

“Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves, and to prevent our getting the notion of a paramount right reason.”
― Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy & Other Writings

“Aristocracies, those children of the established fact, are for epochs of concentration. In epochs of expansion, epochs such as that in which we now live, epochs when always the warning voice is again heard: Now is the judgment of this world, -- in such epochs aristocracies with their natural clinging to the established fact, their want of sense for the flux of things, for the inevitable transitoriness of all human institutions, are bewildered and helpless.”
― Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy & Other Writings

“The difficulty for democracy is, how to find and keep high ideals.”
― Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy & Other Writings