Arthur Hugh Clough Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by Arthur Hugh Clough with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
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“Knowledge is hard to seek, and harder yet to adhere to. Knowledge is painful often; and yet when we know we are happy.”
Meaning & context
Claude presents knowledge as difficult to obtain and live with, yet still capable of giving a kind of clarity or satisfaction once it is possessed.
Source details
Amours de Voyage, Letter X, “Claude to Eustace,—from Rome,” Project Gutenberg #1393. Claude’s two sentences about knowledge appear in the fictional verse-letter sequence after he turns from Roman politics toward study. This is Clough’s fictional epistolary voice, not direct autobiography or an empirical claim about happiness.
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“Say not the struggle nought availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain,”
Meaning & context
Clough begins by challenging the despairing assumption that visible setbacks prove sustained effort has accomplished nothing or that a difficult cause is already lost.
Source details
“Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth,” first published as “The Struggle” in The Crayon, August 1855; text represented by Representative Poetry Online. The poem’s military imagery is metaphorical encouragement shaped by the political disappointments of the 1848–49 era.
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“God forbid you should ever be aught but yourself, my Elspie!”
Meaning & context
Philip answers Elspie’s fear that marriage and class expectations might require her to become someone else by insisting that he wants her to remain herself.
Source details
The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848), represented in Project Gutenberg’s Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough. Philip speaks to Elspie during their courtship conversation after she says she does not want to become “a lady.” The line is fictional verse dialogue and is kept under Philip’s local voice rather than treated as Clough autobiography.