Matthew Arnold Quotes

When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die.

I think I'm really lucky that the things I'm able to love - people, animals - it's like the more you put yourself into it, the more you get out of it.

Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

Just give food without showing affection, [animals] might not get sort of 100% satisfaction. So they also, you see, when we human beings, we show affection, the poor animal also respond to us.

I can't give any absolute definition of what love is, or even whether it ought to exist.

The real actor - like any real artistj- has a direct line to the collective heart.

It is our stories [classic Disney films] that make us human - so Owen [Suskind] has become an expert in what connects us and makes us human. That got to me, the power of these stories, and the lessons these tales give us to create the connection between us.

Love, the beauty of it, the joy of it and yes, even the pain of it, is the most incredible gift to give and to receive as a human being. And we deserve to experience love fully, equally, without shame and without compromise.

For me, it is important to not just tell the audience how the story ended today, but to give a glimpse into how other people's stories might go on, in the future.

People make events into stories. Stories give events meaning.

People love stories and the more you can give information and knowledge and even wisdom through a story, the more likely you are to be heard.

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

Anything that we're connecting with that's happening right now, there's an obvious vulnerability - because we're just fragile human beings in the middle of a just-now expression.

The greatest gift that you can give to others and to yourself is time. Embrace the gift of time whether you give it or receive it.

Touch is the meaning of being human.

The primary urge that motivates and engenders writing...is the writer's desire to invent and tell a story, and to know himself. But the more I write, the more I feel the force of the other urge, which collaborates with and completes the first one: the desire to know the Other from within him. To feel what it means to be another person. To be able to touch, if only for a moment, the blaze that burns within another human being.

Faculty X is a sense of reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it—fragmentary and uncertain though it is—that distinguishes man from all other animals.

Guilt kept me going. It was impossible not to blame myself for what had happened, but even guilt was a comfort. It was a human feeling, a sign that I was still attached to the same world that other men lived in.

The artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition-and therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty and pain.

If we can augment our gift giving by giving more of ourselves to those we love, all the time and in various ways, we will have a good chance of helping them and ourselves live happier, better lives.

But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?

By giving the love act a name, if only an innocent little word like, "it," he paved the way for other words, words that would reflect physical love as in a set of mirrors.

No matter how much we love a book, the experience of reading it isn't complete until we can give it to someone who will love it as much as we do