Matthew Arnold Quotes

What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.

For a time I didn't want to answer any questions about Queen. I'd like to be viewed as something alive and relevant, not some fossil.

Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.

It would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of [a work], outside of the narrowest and most obvious limits. At the one extreme some works of genius would be sure to miss appreciation. Their very novelty would make them repulsive until the public had learned the new language in which their author spoke.

I'm interested in teasing out the contemporary issues in what I'm working on, however old the piece might be, whenever I'm working on it.

... France is the genius among nations.

It's really important in our society to tell stories, and I feel grateful and honoured that I get to do that in this day and age.

Michael Joseph Jackson's genius was the ability to be the raw article himself - the real article himself. He is part of the African American people who were marginalized.

That genius is feeble which cannot hold its own before the masterpieces of the world.

Every work of Genius is tinctured by the feelings, and often originates in the events of times.

Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.

Tell him solitude is creative if he is strong and the final decisions are made in silent rooms. Tell him to be different from other people if it comes natural and easy being different. Let him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives. Let him seek deep for where he is a born natural. Then he may understand Shakespeare and the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov, Michael Faraday and free imaginations Bringing changes into a world resenting change. He will be lonely enough to have time for the work he knows as his own.

Mozart is everyone's tea, pleasing to highbrows, middlebrows and lowbrows alike, though they probably all get different kinds of pleasure from him.

CBGB represents a lot to New York City and to underground rock and to new wave and post-punk and whatever. But, you know, it's like tearing down the Jefferson Memorial or something.

It is in the blood of genius to love play for its own sake, and whether one uses one's skill on thrones or women, swords or pens, gold or fame, the game's the thing.

I've become really aware of all the subtle things you can communicate through the art and how you're presenting a character, particularly someone like Wonder Woman, who means so much to so many people.

The difference between Talent and Genius is that Talent says things which he has never heard but once, and Genius things which he has never heard.

Every authentic work of art is a gift offered to the future.

Things have no power that humans don't put there.

The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. . . . They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; - cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame.

Woman is quick to revere genius, but in her secret soul she seldom loves it.

Genius, indeed, melts many ages into one, and thus effects something permanent, yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral writer. A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or perchance of a hundred centuries.

Once you've seen certain things, you can't un-see them, and seeing nothing is as political an act as seeing something.

Catholicism believes in the Virgen de Guadalupe. The mother of God is worshipped, especially in Latin America. I find her very empowering. I find that the Virgen de Guadalupe allowed me to return to parts of my upbringing I had disregarded.