To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
Meaning of the quote
When you feel like you're being creative and making something new, it makes you really happy and shows that you're alive and full of energy. Being able to create things, whether it's art, stories, or inventions, is one of the best ways to feel truly alive and content.
About Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic in the 19th century. He came from a prominent family, with his father being the headmaster of Rugby School. Arnold worked as a school inspector and advocated for state-regulated secondary education.
More quotes from Matthew Arnold
The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
It is so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
And we forget because we must and not because we will.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
The need of expansion is as genuine an instinct in man as the need in a plant for the light, or the need in man himself for going upright. The love of liberty is simply the instinct in man for expansion.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
Greatness is a spiritual condition.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
Spare me the whispering, crowded room, the friends who come and gape and go, the ceremonious air of gloom – all, which makes death a hideous show.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
British poet and cultural critic (1822-1888)