The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

To shake his sapient head and give
The ill he cannot cure a name.
‘A Wish’ (1867)
And sigh that one thing only has been lent
To youth and age in common—discontent.
‘Youth’s Agitations’ (1852)
Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just
ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.
‘Culture and Anarchy’ (1869) preface
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.
‘Culture and Anarchy’ (1869) ch. 1.
The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.
‘Culture and Anarchy’ (1869) ch. 1
When I want to distinguish clearly the aristocratic class from the Philistines proper, or middle
class, [I] name the former, in my own mind the Barbarians.
‘Culture and Anarchy’ (1869) ch. 3
That vast portion...of the working-class which, raw and half-developed, has long lain halfhidden
amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an
Englishman’s heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by
marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes—to
this vast residuum we may with great propriety give the name of Populace.
‘Culture and Anarchy’ (1869) ch. 3
Hebraism and Hellenism—between these two points of influence moves our
World.
‘Culture and Anarchy’ (1869) ch. 4
‘He knows’ says Hebraism, ‘his Bible!’—whenever we hear this said, we may, without any
elaborate defence of culture, content ourselves with answering simply: ‘No man, who knows
nothing else, knows even his Bible.’
‘Culture and Anarchy’ (1869) ch. 5
Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate,
absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life.
‘Essays in Criticism’ First Series (1865) preface
Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our
century, so serene!...whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age....
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
On Oxford in ‘Essays in Criticism’ First Series (1865) preface
‘Our unrivalled happiness’;—what an element of grimness, bareness, and hideousness mixes
with it and blurs it; the workhouse, the dismal Mapperly Hills,—how dismal those who have seen
them will remember;—the gloom, the smoke, the cold, the strangled illegitimate child!...And the