Matthew Arnold Quotes About Perfection
-
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
→ -
Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
→ -
Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.
→ -
The Greek word euphuia, a finely tempered nature, gives exactly the notion of perfection as culture brings us to perceive it; a harmonious perfection, a perfection in which the characters of beauty and intelligence are both present, which unites "the two noblest of things" - as Swift most happily calls them in his Battle of the Books, "the two noblest of things, sweetness and light."
→ -
Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.
→ -
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.... He who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and the will of God prevail.
→ -
Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
→
Related Authors
-
-
John Henry Newman Priest -
Lionel Trilling Literary critic -
Mark Twain Author -
Robert Browning Poet -
-
Walter Pater Critic -
Charles Dickens Writer -
Percy Bysshe Shelley Poet -
William Wordsworth Poet -
Alfred Lord Tennyson Poet -
Samuel Johnson Writer -
T. S. Eliot Playwright -
John Milton Poet -
Christina Rossetti Poet -
-
John Keats Poet -
John Ruskin Art critic -
-
George William Russell Writer