Matthew Arnold Quotes

As Commander-in-Chief, I take pleasure in commending the reading of the Bible to all who serve in the Armed Forces of the United States. Throughout the centuries, men of many faiths and diverse origins have found in the Sacred Book words of wisdom, counsel, and inspiration. It is a fountain of strength...an aid in attaining the highest aspiration of the human soul.

The result of your fifty or sixty years of religious reading in the four words: 'Be just and good,' is that in which all our enquiries must end.

No human being or society ... ever did or ever will come to much unless their conduct was governed and guided by the love of some ethical ideal

to a rational being there is but one rule of conduct, justice

The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.

In the right hands, literature is not resorted to as a consolation, and by the broken and decayed, but as a decalogue.

The state dictates and coerces; religion teaches and persuades. The state enacts laws; religion gives commandments. The state is armed with physical force and makes use of it if need be; the force of religion is love and benevolence.

Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?

The relationship between the films and the individual Commandments [is] a tentative one. The films should be influenced by the individual Commandments to the same degree that the Commandments influence our daily lives.

Justice-august and pure, the abstract idea of all that would be perfect in the spirits and the inspirations of men!-where the mind rises; where the heart expands; where the countenance is ever placid and benign; where her favorite attitude is to stoop to the unfortunate; to hear their cry and to help them; to rescue and relieve; to succor and save; majestic, from its mercy; venerable, from its Lutility; uplifted, without pride; firm without obduracy; beneficent in each preference; lovely, though in her frown!

The content of scientific theory itself offers no moral foundation for the personal conduct of life.

And that whole do-able/undo-able thing? Yeah. Need I point out that neither Ruth nor I have ever "done" anybody in our lives?

The gospel of Jesus Christ prescribes the wisest rules for just conduct in every situation in life. Happy they who are enabled to obey them in all situations!

The proper office of religion is to regulate the heart of men, humanize their conduct, infuse the spirit of temperance, order, andobedience; and as its operation is silent, and only enforces the motives of morality and justice, it is in danger of being overlooked, and confounded with these other motives.

By renouncing the Bible, philosophers swing from their moorings upon all moral subjects..It is the only correct map of the human heart that ever has been published.

We give advice, we do not inspire conduct.

It's said that prayer can move mountains. Well, it's certainly moved the hearts and minds of Americans in their times of trial and helped them to achieve a society that, for all its imperfections, is still the envy of the world and the last, best hope of mankind.

It is not what you say that matters. It is what you are and how you live.

This book [the Bible] speaks both the voice of God and the voice of humanity, for there is told in it the most convincing of human experience that has ever been written...and those who heed that story will know their strength and happiness and success are all summed up in the exhortation, "Fear God and keep His commandments."

... religion (ought to be if it isn't) a great deal more than mere gratification of the instinct for worship linked with the straight-teaching of irreproachable credos. Religion must be life made true; and life is action, growth, development--begun now and ending never.

Institutional Christianity has had clear secular benefits to American life for hundreds of years. It's played both a prophetic role in terms of generating moral critiques of American excesses, and so on, and also a communal role, in terms of building community as the country moved westward to the role my own Catholic Church played in assimilating generations of immigrants.

I conceive the essential task of religion to be "to develop the consciences, the ideals, and the aspirations of mankind".

Suppose a nation in some distant region should take the Bible for their only law book, and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there exhibited. What a Utopia! What a paradise this region would be.

The great moral teachers of humanity were in a way artistic geniuses in the art of living.

Ethical inquiry has always been motivated by the aim of improving human conduct. It doesn't follow from that that the goal is to produce a complete rule book that would be applicable to all cases.