Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by T. S. Eliot, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring T. S. Eliot quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 591 T. S. Eliot quotes for you to read and share.
Unreal friendship may turn to real
But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended -- T. S. Eliot
April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain. -- T. S. Eliot
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being. -- T. S. Eliot
The greatness of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards. -- T. S. Eliot
The nightingales are singing near The Convent of the Sacred Heart, And sang within the bloody wood When Agamemnon cried aloud, And let their liquid siftings fall To stain the stiff dishonored shroud. -- T. S. Eliot
Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety. -- T. S. Eliot
It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind. -- T. S. Eliot
Uncorsetted, her friendly bust
Gives promise of pneumatic bliss. -- T. S. Eliot
I can show you fear in a handful of dust -- T. S. Eliot
The evening lay out against the sky
Like a patient, etherised on a table -- T. S. Eliot
Heretic ... is a person who seizes upon a truth and pushes it to the point at which it becomes a falsehood. -- T. S. Eliot
Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to. -- T. S. Eliot
You must not on any account give me credit for being penetrating. I have impressed people that way before, and the result is always disaster. -- T. S. Eliot
The river is within us, the sea is all about us; -- T. S. Eliot
Art serves us best precisely at that point where it can shift our sense of what is possible, when we know more than we knew before, when we feel we have - by some manner of a leap - encountered the truth. That, by the logic of art, is always worth the pain. -- T. S. Eliot
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. -- T. S. Eliot
Poetry consists in so rendering concrete objects that the emotions produced by the objects shall arise in the reader ... . -- T. S. Eliot
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? -- T. S. Eliot
Our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and of our visible, sensible world. -- T. S. Eliot
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
The houses are all gone under the sea.
The dancers are all gone under the hill. -- T. S. Eliot
That is the worst moment, when you feel you have lost / The desires for all that was most desirable, / Before you are contented with what you can desire; / Before you know what is left to be desired; / And you go on wishing that you could desire / What desire has left behind. -- T. S. Eliot
Everyone's alone - or so it seems to me. They make noises, and think they are talking to each other; They make faces, and think they understand each other. And I'm sure they don't. Is that a delusion? -- T. S. Eliot
It has frequently been said that we never desire what we think absolutely inapprehensible: it is however true that some of our sharpest agonies are those in which the object of desire is regarded as both possible and imaginary. -- T. S. Eliot
Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough. -- T. S. Eliot
It is certain that a book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it. -- T. S. Eliot
The awful daring of a moment's surrender which an age of prudence
can never retract.
by this, and only this, we have existed. -- T. S. Eliot
Though you forget the way to the Temple,
There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger. -- T. S. Eliot
The difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show. -- T. S. Eliot
And right action is freedom from past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim never to be realized. Who are only undefeated because we have gone on trying. The Dry Salvages -- T. S. Eliot
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind. -- T. S. Eliot
There is no such thing as a lost cause, because there is no such thing as a gained cause -- T. S. Eliot
Dear Mother, I am getting on nicely in my work at the bank, and like it ... I want to find out something about the science of money while I am at it; it is an extraordinarily interesting subject ... -- T. S. Eliot
We returned to our palaces, these Kingdoms, but no longer at ease here in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death. -- T. S. Eliot
There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference, ... -- T. S. Eliot
For our own past is covered by the currents of action,
But the torment of others remains an experience
Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.
People change, and smile: but the agony abides. -- T. S. Eliot
I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. -- T. S. Eliot
Light
Light
The visible reminder of Invisible Light. -- T. S. Eliot
But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where. -- T. S. Eliot
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me. -- T. S. Eliot
Envy is everywhere. Who is without envy? And most people Are unaware or unashamed of being envious. -- T. S. Eliot
You are not here to verify,/ Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity/ Or carry report. You are here to kneel/ Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more/ Than an order of words, the conscious occupation/ Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying. -- T. S. Eliot
We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds, ... for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism. -- T. S. Eliot
The pain of living and the drug of dreams
curl up the small soul in the window seat. -- T. S. Eliot
I do not approve the extermination of the enemy; the policy of exterminating or, as it is barbarously said, liquidating enemies, is one of the most alarming developments of modern war and peace, from the point of view of those who desire the survival -- T. S. Eliot
But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. -- T. S. Eliot
If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless. -- T. S. Eliot
It takes so many years to learn that one is dead. -- T. S. Eliot
The work of creation is never without travail. -- T. S. Eliot
If Hell is where nothing connects, then being in the field of English must be the key to heaven's door! We are in the business of finding connections
within texts, between texts and contexts, between texts and ourselves, between our readings and the readings of other interpreters. -- T. S. Eliot
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. -- T. S. Eliot
Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain. -- T. S. Eliot
Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless. -- T. S. Eliot
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant -- T. S. Eliot
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore. -- T. S. Eliot
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms -- T. S. Eliot
If you find examples of humanism which are anti-religious, or at least in opposition to the religious faith of the place and time, then such humanism is purely destructive, for it has never found anything to replace what it has destroyed. -- T. S. Eliot
These fragments I have shored against my ruins -- T. S. Eliot
The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without. -- T. S. Eliot
Turn things you've always wanted to do, into things you've done -- T. S. Eliot
There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled. -- T. S. Eliot
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated And let my cry come unto Thee. -- T. S. Eliot
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? -- T. S. Eliot
Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self. -- T. S. Eliot
certain of certain certainties....... -- T. S. Eliot
The trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things about God and man which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel towards God and man as they did. -- T. S. Eliot
In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away. -- T. S. Eliot
Past art is subject to change. -- T. S. Eliot
To country people Cows are mild, And flee from any stick they throw; But I'm a timid town bred child, And all the cattle seem to know. -- T. S. Eliot
We have all our private terrors, our particular shadows, our secret fears. We are afraid in a fear which we cannot face, which none understands, and our hearts are torn from us, our brains unskinned like the layers of an onion, ourselves the last. -- T. S. Eliot
No generation is interested in art in quite the same way as any other; each generation, like each individual, brings to the contemplation of art its own categories of appreciation, makes its own demands upon art, and has its own uses for art. -- T. S. Eliot
In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light. We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and ecstasy is too much pain. -- T. S. Eliot
The ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes -- T. S. Eliot
We acknowledge our trespass, our weakness, our fault; we acknowledge That the sin of the world is upon our heads; that the blood of the martyrs and the agony of the saints Is upon our heads. Lord, have mercy upon us. Christ, have mercy upon us. Lord, have mercy upon us. Blessed Thomas, pray for us. -- T. S. Eliot
The sense of wellbeing! Its often with us When we are young, but then it's not noticed; And by the time one has grown to consciousness It comes less often. -- T. S. Eliot
I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare. -- T. S. Eliot
When war is not just it is subsequently justified; so it becomes
many things. In reality, an unjust war is merely piracy.
It consists of piracy, ego and, more than anything, money.
War is our century's prostitution. -- T. S. Eliot
Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall
My buried life, and Paris in the spring,
I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world
To be wonderful and youthful afterall -- T. S. Eliot
A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter. -- T. S. Eliot
The lot of man is ceaseless labor, Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder. -- T. S. Eliot
I can connect
Nothing with nothing -- T. S. Eliot
And what you thought you came for
is only a shell, a husk of meaning
from which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
if at all. Either you had no purpose
or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfillment. -- T. S. Eliot
A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. -- T. S. Eliot
If we really want to pray we must first learn to listen, for in the silence of the heart God speaks. -- T. S. Eliot
What the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. -- T. S. Eliot
The communication/of the dead is tongued with fire beyond/the language of the living
The Little Gidding -- T. S. Eliot
We can at least try to understand our own motives, passions, and prejudices, so as to be conscious of what we are doing when we apeal to those of others. This is very difficult, because our own prejudice and emotional bias always seems to us so rational. -- T. S. Eliot
Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors. -- T. S. Eliot
War among men defiles this world. -- T. S. Eliot
My mind may be American but my heart is British. -- T. S. Eliot
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives. -- T. S. Eliot
Men live by forgetting and woman live on memories. -- T. S. Eliot
No scheme for a change of society can be made to appear immediately palatable, except by falsehood, until society has become so desperate that it will accept any change. -- T. S. Eliot
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. -- T. S. Eliot
But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things. -- T. S. Eliot
I could see nothing behind that child's eye. 40
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him. -- T. S. Eliot
So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist. -- T. S. Eliot
Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead. -- T. S. Eliot
I do not know much about gods;but I think that the river is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable ... -- T. S. Eliot
We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form. -- T. S. Eliot
Home is where one starts from. -- T. S. Eliot
Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky -- T. S. Eliot
Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird meaning death -- T. S. Eliot
If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you. -- T. S. Eliot
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. -- T. S. Eliot
What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. -- T. S. Eliot
At the still point, there the dance is. -- T. S. Eliot
I love reading another reader's list of favorites. Even when I find I do not share their tastes or predilections, I am provoked to compare, contrast, and contradict. It is a most healthy exercise, and one altogether fruitful. -- T. S. Eliot
Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. -- T. S. Eliot
It is impossible to say just what I mean! -- T. S. Eliot
A woman drew her long black hair out tight, And fiddled whisper music on those strings, And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings, And crawled head downward down a blackened wall. -- T. S. Eliot
What is this self inside us, this silent observer,
Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us
And urge us to futile activity,
And in the end, Judge us still more severely,
For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us? -- T. S. Eliot
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter / And on her daughter / They wash their feet in soda water. -- T. S. Eliot
Many people give the appearance of progress by shedding the prejudices and irrational postulates of one generation only to acquire those of the next. -- T. S. Eliot
I am glad you have a Cat, but I do not believe it is So remarkable a cat as My Cat. -- T. S. Eliot
Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment. -- T. S. Eliot
Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm, retreating to the corner of arm and knee, eager to be reassured, taking pleasure in the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree. -- T. S. Eliot
We must remember that what a writer does to people is not necessarily what he intends to do. It may be only what people are capable of having done to them. -- T. S. Eliot
A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after - and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys. -- T. S. Eliot
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question -- T. S. Eliot
If time and space, as sages say,
Are things which cannot be,
The sun which does not feel decay
No greater is than we.
So why, Love, should we ever pray
To live a century?
The butterfly that lives a day
Has lived eternity. -- T. S. Eliot
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted -- T. S. Eliot
He is haunted by a demon, a demon against which he feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing; and the words, the poem he makes, are a kind of exorcism of this demon. -- T. S. Eliot
Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. -- T. S. Eliot
The morning comes to consciousness -- T. S. Eliot
I am moved by fancies that are curled, around these images and cling, the notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing. -- T. S. Eliot
The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith. -- T. S. Eliot
There are flood and drought over the eyes and in the mouth, dead water and dead sand contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil gapes at the vanity of toil, laughs without mirth. This is the death of the earth. -- T. S. Eliot
The role of art is not to express the personality but to overcome it. -- T. S. Eliot
That meddling in other people's affairs ... formerly conducted by the most discreet intrigue is now openly advocated under the name of intervention. -- T. S. Eliot
When a Cat adopts you there is nothing to be done about it except to put up with it until the wind changes. -- T. S. Eliot
When the whole world is running headlong towards the precipice, one who walks in the opposite direction is looked at as being crazy. -- T. S. Eliot
And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices in the lost lilac and the lost sea voices and the weak spirit quickens to rebel for the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell quickens to recover. -- T. S. Eliot
I gotta use words to talk to you. -- T. S. Eliot
In a world of fugitives the one who stays home will seem to be running away -- T. S. Eliot
that which is only living
Can only die -- T. S. Eliot
To make an end is to make a beginning. -- T. S. Eliot
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance. -- T. S. Eliot
There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience. -- T. S. Eliot
What is hell? Hell is oneself.
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone. -- T. S. Eliot
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you. -- T. S. Eliot
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells. -- T. S. Eliot
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think -- T. S. Eliot
I must tell you that I should really like to think there's something wrong with me- Because, if there isn't, then there's something wrong with the world itself-and that's much more frightening! That would be terrible. So I'd rather believe there is something wrong with me, that could be put right. -- T. S. Eliot
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. -- T. S. Eliot
Culture is not enough, even though nothing is enough without culture. -- T. S. Eliot
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves. -- T. S. Eliot
The eastern light our spires touch at morning, The light that slants upon our western doors at evening, The twilight over stagnant pools at batflight, Moon light and star light, owl and moth light, Glow-worm glowlight on a grassblade. O Light Invisible, we worship Thee! -- T. S. Eliot
As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. -- T. S. Eliot
I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;Her coat is one of the tabby kind,with tiger stripes and lepard spots. -- T. S. Eliot
Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmen. -- T. S. Eliot
Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it. -- T. S. Eliot
The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible. -- T. S. Eliot
Those who arrive at the end of the journey are not those who began. -- T. S. Eliot
To men of a certain type The suspicion that they are incapable of loving Is as disturbing to their self-esteem As, in cruder men, the fear of impotence. -- T. S. Eliot
It's not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them. -- T. S. Eliot
The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn. -- T. S. Eliot
Gin and drugs, dear lady, gin and drugs. -- T. S. Eliot
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre -
To be redeemed from fire by fire. -- T. S. Eliot
It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves. -- T. S. Eliot
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. -- T. S. Eliot
That's not what I meant at all ... that's not it at all. -- T. S. Eliot
My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down. -- T. S. Eliot
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper. -- T. S. Eliot
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still -- T. S. Eliot
It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape, not from our own time - for we are bound by that - but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time. -- T. S. Eliot
When comparing works of art, it is important that the art itself, and not the artists, be considered. -- T. S. Eliot
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death Pray for us now and at the hour of our death. -- T. S. Eliot
At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitful face of hope and of despair -- T. S. Eliot
We don't actually fear death, we fear that no one will notice our absence, that we will disappear without a trace. -- T. S. Eliot
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything) -- T. S. Eliot
And I must borrow every changing shape
To find expression ... dance, dance
Like a dancing bear,
Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.
Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance -- T. S. Eliot
For I have known them all already, known them all
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. -- T. S. Eliot
In spite of all the dishonour,
the broken standards, the broken lives,
The broken faith in one place or another,
There was something left that was more than the tales
Of old men on winter evenings. -- T. S. Eliot
The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence -- T. S. Eliot
LAVINIA: Oh Edward!
The point is, that since I've been away
I see that I've taken you much too seriously.
And now I can see how absurd you are.
EDWARD: That is a very serious conclusion to have arrived at in ... how many? ... thirty-two hours. -- T. S. Eliot
Distracted from distraction by distraction -- T. S. Eliot
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove. -- T. S. Eliot
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me. -- T. S. Eliot
Now that the lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room -- T. S. Eliot
The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man -- T. S. Eliot
O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. -- T. S. Eliot
Who is the third that walks always beside you? When I count there are only you and I together. -- T. S. Eliot
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. -- T. S. Eliot
Believe me, Michael:
Those who flee from the past will always lose the race.
I know this from experience. When you reach your goal,
Your imagined paradise of success and grandeur,
You will find your past failures waiting there to greet you. -- T. S. Eliot
The soul of Man must quicken to creation. -- T. S. Eliot
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers.
As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool. -- T. S. Eliot
The purpose of a Christian education would not be merely to make men and women pious Christians: a system which aimed too rigidly at this end alone would become only obscurantist. A Christian education must primarily teach people to be able to think in Christian categories. -- T. S. Eliot
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end -- T. S. Eliot
Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden. -- T. S. Eliot
As we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated of dead and living. -- T. S. Eliot
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea. -- T. S. Eliot
The darkness declares the glory of the light. -- T. S. Eliot
Datta, dayadhvam, damyata
(Give, sympathize, control) -- T. S. Eliot
A martyr is, he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, not lost it but found it, for he has found freedom in submission to God. The martyr no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of martyrdom. -- T. S. Eliot
We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value - a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity. -- T. S. Eliot
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. -- T. S. Eliot
We read many books, because we cannot know enough people. -- T. S. Eliot
Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? -- T. S. Eliot
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers. -- T. S. Eliot
Destiny waits in the hand of god, shaping the still unshapen.. -- T. S. Eliot
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison. -- T. S. Eliot
Men dislike being awakened from their death in life. -- T. S. Eliot
There will be time to murder and create. -- T. S. Eliot
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly. -- T. S. Eliot
There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him. -- T. S. Eliot
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom -- T. S. Eliot
You will have to live with those memories and make them into something new. Only by acceptance of the past will you alter its meaning. -- T. S. Eliot
We do not pass through the same door twice Or return to the door through which we did not pass -- T. S. Eliot
It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words. -- T. S. Eliot
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice -- T. S. Eliot
The last act is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the wrong reason. -- T. S. Eliot
My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand. -- T. S. Eliot
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart. -- T. S. Eliot
The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink. -- T. S. Eliot
Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know. -- T. S. Eliot
Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity -- T. S. Eliot
This form, this face, this life living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken, the awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships. -- T. S. Eliot
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. -- T. S. Eliot
He laughed like an irresponsible foetus. -- T. S. Eliot
I have measured out my life in coffee spoons. -- T. S. Eliot
For us there is only the trying. -- T. S. Eliot
Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment. -- T. S. Eliot
Any religion is forever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion. -- T. S. Eliot
It is just the literature that we read for 'amusement' or 'purely for pleasure' that may have the greatest, least suspected, earliest influence on us. -- T. S. Eliot
Genuine blasphemy, genuine in spirit and not purely verbal, is the product of partial belief, and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect Christian. -- T. S. Eliot
When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom, the work is likely to sprawl. -- T. S. Eliot
We do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on. -- T. S. Eliot
Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third. -- T. S. Eliot
From a purely external point of view there is no will; and to find will in any phenomenon requires a certain empathy; we observe aman's actions and place ourselves partly but not wholly in his position; or we act, and place ourselves partly in the position of an outsider. -- T. S. Eliot
Not less of love, but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the Future as well as the past. -- T. S. Eliot
No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest- for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude. -- T. S. Eliot
The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together. -- T. S. Eliot
We should not confuse information with knowledge. -- T. S. Eliot
To approach the stranger is to invite the unexpected, release a new force, let the genie out of the bottle. It is to start a new train of events that is beyond your control ... -- T. S. Eliot
This is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word. -- T. S. Eliot
With a poem you can say 'I got my feeling into words for myself. I now have the equivalent in words for that much of what I have felt.' -- T. S. Eliot
Every moment is a new and shocking transvaluation of all we have ever been. -- T. S. Eliot
I learn a great deal by merely observing you, and letting you talk as long as you please, and taking note of what you do not say. -- T. S. Eliot
The lady of situations. -- T. S. Eliot
The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. -- T. S. Eliot
Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'/Let us go and make our visit. -- T. S. Eliot
Good poets borrow, great poets steal -- T. S. Eliot
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. -- T. S. Eliot
The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity, sluggish and indomitable as a glacier, will mitigate the most violent, and depress the most exalted revolution. -- T. S. Eliot
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place ... -- T. S. Eliot
Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions. -- T. S. Eliot
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME -- T. S. Eliot
I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end. -- T. S. Eliot
When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again. -- T. S. Eliot
Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has never happened before. -- T. S. Eliot
Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them. -- T. S. Eliot
Shall we ever meet again?
And who will meet again?
Meeting is for strangers.
Meeting is for those who do not know each other. -- T. S. Eliot
In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession. -- T. S. Eliot
Well here again that don't apply
But I've gotta use words when I talk to you. -- T. S. Eliot
A national culture, if it is to flourish, should be a constellation of cultures, the constitutes of which, benefiting each other, benefit the whole. -- T. S. Eliot
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon - O swallow swallow -- T. S. Eliot
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair- -- T. S. Eliot
Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness ... -- T. S. Eliot
And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness. -- T. S. Eliot
The great ages did not contain the best talent, they wasted less. -- T. S. Eliot
I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics. -- T. S. Eliot
Where shall the word be found, where will the word Resound? -- T. S. Eliot
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us. -- T. S. Eliot
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers. -- T. S. Eliot
I suspect that in our loathing of totalitarianism, there is infused a good deal of admiration for its efficiency. -- T. S. Eliot
I am no prophet - and here's no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, -- T. S. Eliot
O father, father
Gone from us, lost to us,
The church lies bereft,
Alone,
Desecrated, desolated.
And the heathen shall build
On the ruins
Their world without God.
I see it.
I see it. -- T. S. Eliot
Only through time time is conquered -- T. S. Eliot
Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit; -- T. S. Eliot
Poetry is a mug's game. -- T. S. Eliot
The fool,fixed in his folly,may think He can turn the wheel on which he turns. -- T. S. Eliot
There is nothing at all to be done about it, There is nothing to do about anything. -- T. S. Eliot
If you want it you must obtain it by great labor. -- T. S. Eliot
My name is only an anagram of toilets. -- T. S. Eliot
It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored in climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both. -- T. S. Eliot
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. -- T. S. Eliot
And if all that is meaningless, I want to be cured
Of a craving for something I cannot find And of the shame of never finding it. -- T. S. Eliot
We learn what poetry is - if we ever learn - by reading it. -- T. S. Eliot
I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different. -- T. S. Eliot
These are only hints an guesses ... the rest is prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action. -- T. S. Eliot
The roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at. -- T. S. Eliot
Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree : you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say 'this we know'. -- T. S. Eliot
Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin. -- T. S. Eliot
Birth, and copulation, and death; that's all the facts when you come to brass tacks. -- T. S. Eliot
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. -- T. S. Eliot
Touch me
It's so easy to leave me
All alone with my memory
Of my days in the sun
If you touch me
You'll understand what happiness is
Look, a new day has began -- T. S. Eliot
So first, your memory I'll jog, And say: A CAT IS NOT A DOG -- T. S. Eliot
The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely. -- T. S. Eliot
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. -- T. S. Eliot
Quick now, here, now, always-
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one. -- T. S. Eliot
Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks Faced by the snarled and yelping seas. -- T. S. Eliot
I an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces. -- T. S. Eliot
There is no escape from metre; there is only mastery. -- T. S. Eliot
Footsteps shuffled on the stair/Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair/Spread out in fiery points/Glowed into words, then would be savagely still. -- T. S. Eliot
The wilderness is cracked and browned But through the water pale and thin Still shine the unoffending feet And there above the painter set 15 The Father and the Paraclete. . -- T. S. Eliot
And the end and the beginning where always there, before the beginning and after the end. -- T. S. Eliot
Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, -- T. S. Eliot
For every life and every act consequence of good and evil can be shown and as in time results of many deeds are blended so good and evil in the end become confounded. -- T. S. Eliot
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. -- T. S. Eliot
And so each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate -- T. S. Eliot
The chief danger about Paris is that it is such a strong stimulant. -- T. S. Eliot
It is not enough to understand what we ought to be, unless we know what we are; and we do not understand what we are, unless we know what we ought to be. -- T. S. Eliot
What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter -- T. S. Eliot
The destination cannot be described; / You will know very little until you get there; / You will journey blind. -- T. S. Eliot
Nothing pleases people more than to go on thinking what they have always thought, and at the same time imagine that they are thinking something new and daring: it combines the advantage of
security and the delight of adventure. -- T. S. Eliot
A christian martyrdom is never an accident, for Saints are not made by accident. -- T. S. Eliot
In my beginning is my end. -- T. S. Eliot
The immature poet imitates, the mature poet plagiarizes, -- T. S. Eliot
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress? -- T. S. Eliot
The past and future / Are conquered, and reconciled. -- T. S. Eliot
If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are? -- T. S. Eliot
When we talk about Poetry, with a capital P, we are apt to think only of the more intense emotions or the more magical phrase: nevertheless there are a great many casements in poetry which are not magic, and which do not open on the foam of perilous seas, but are perfectly good windows for all that. -- T. S. Eliot
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand. -- T. S. Eliot
I have gone at dusk through narrow streets and watched the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men leaning out of windows -- T. S. Eliot
Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature. -- T. S. Eliot
What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning. -- T. S. Eliot
Talent imitates, but genius steals. -- T. S. Eliot
Where is all the knowledge we lost with information? -- T. S. Eliot
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these. -- T. S. Eliot
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question... -- T. S. Eliot
There are evil neighborhoods of noise and evil neighborhoods of silence, and Eeldrop and Appleplex preferred the latter, as being the more evil. It -- T. S. Eliot
The still point in a turning world. -- T. S. Eliot
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us ... and we drown. -- T. S. Eliot
The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible. -- T. S. Eliot
Each day a raid on the inarticulate--T.S. Eliot -- T. S. Eliot
Accident is design / And design is accident / In a cloud of unknowing. -- T. S. Eliot
The essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal; it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory. -- T. S. Eliot
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet. -- T. S. Eliot
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow -- T. S. Eliot
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. -- T. S. Eliot
I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling. -- T. S. Eliot
Humor is also a way of saying something serious. -- T. S. Eliot
Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, Falls the shadow. -- T. S. Eliot
Between the desire
And the spasm,
Between the potency
And the existence,
Between the essence
And the descent,
Falls the Shadow. -- T. S. Eliot
Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow -- T. S. Eliot
Time past and time future
what might have been and what has been
point to one end, which is always present. -- T. S. Eliot
I see the eyes but not the tears
This is my affliction. -- T. S. Eliot
There's no vocabulary For love within a family, love that's lived in But not looked at, love within the light of which All else is seen, the love within which All other love finds speech. This love is silent. -- T. S. Eliot
And the wind shall say: 'Here were decent Godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls. -- T. S. Eliot
I shall not want Honor in Heaven For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney And have talk with Coriolanus And other heroes of that kidney. -- T. S. Eliot
Anecdote: It is by no means self-evident that human beings are most real when most violently excited; violent physical passions do not in themselves differentiate men from each other, but rather tend to reduce them to the same state. -- T. S. Eliot
We had the experience, but we missed the meaning. -- T. S. Eliot
Redeem the time. Redeem the unread vision of a higher dream ... -- T. S. Eliot
Your burden is not to clear your conscience
But to learn how to bear the burdens on your conscience. -- T. S. Eliot
The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself. -- T. S. Eliot
When the gods know that a god hath fallen, With this kindly feeling They do encourage him
Be thou a god again and again. -- T. S. Eliot
Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste and end by debauching it. -- T. S. Eliot
For history is a pattern Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel History is now and England. -- T. S. Eliot
Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power -- T. S. Eliot
The word within a word, unable to speak a word -- T. S. Eliot
Turning Wearily, as one would turn to nod goodbye to Rochefoucauld, If the street were time and he as the end of the street. -- T. S. Eliot
The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good. -- T. S. Eliot
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues. -- T. S. Eliot
Friendship should be more than biting time can sever. -- T. S. Eliot
Love compels cruelty To those who do not understand love. -- T. S. Eliot
The old should be explorers, be curious, risk transgression, explore oldness itself. -- T. S. Eliot
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium. -- T. S. Eliot
People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events. -- T. S. Eliot
Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. -- T. S. Eliot
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn. -- T. S. Eliot
When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences. -- T. S. Eliot
Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself. -- T. S. Eliot
He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it -- T. S. Eliot
The journey, Not the destination matters... -- T. S. Eliot
They don't understand what it is to be awake, / To be living on several planes at once / Though one cannot speak with several voices at once. -- T. S. Eliot
Daffodil bulbs instead of balls
Stared from the sockets of the eyes!
He knew that thought clings round dead limbs
Tightening its lusts and luxuries. -- T. S. Eliot
In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo. -- T. S. Eliot
It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good. -- T. S. Eliot
Never commit yourself to a cheese without having first examined it. -- T. S. Eliot
The hippopotamus's day Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts; God works in a mysterious way- The Church can sleep and feed at once. -- T. S. Eliot
It's harder to confess the sin that no one believes in Than the crime that everyone can appreciate. For the crime is in relation to the law And the sin is in relation to the sinner. -- T. S. Eliot
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past. -- T. S. Eliot
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph. -- T. S. Eliot
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom -- T. S. Eliot
We ask only to be reassured
About the noises in the cellar
And the window that should not have been open -- T. S. Eliot
To justify Christian morality because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion. -- T. S. Eliot
I've been born, and once is enough. -- T. S. Eliot
Teach us to care and not to care -- T. S. Eliot
April is the cruelest month - - - - mixing memory and desire - - - -- T. S. Eliot
April is the cruellest month. -- T. S. Eliot
April is the cruelest month. -- T. S. Eliot
Maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one's age, and with the same intensity as the emotions of youth. -- T. S. Eliot
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume? -- T. S. Eliot
Can we only love
Something created in our own imaginations? -- T. S. Eliot
Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative. -- T. S. Eliot
My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think. -- T. S. Eliot
The nymphs are departed. -- T. S. Eliot
What have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed. -- T. S. Eliot
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor -
And this, and so much more? - -- T. S. Eliot
Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still. -- T. S. Eliot
Every moment is a fresh beginning. -- T. S. Eliot
Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity, there never was a cat of such deceitfulness and sauvity. -- T. S. Eliot
I say to you: Make perfect your will. / I say: take no thought of the harvest, / But only of proper sowing. -- T. S. Eliot
No artist produces great art by a deliberate attempt to express his own personality. -- T. S. Eliot
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing -- T. S. Eliot
It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous.
Resign yourself to be the fool you are ...
... We must always take risks. That is our destiny ... -- T. S. Eliot
Would it have been worthwhile
If one settling a pillow by her head should say:
That is not what I meant at all
That is not it at all -- T. S. Eliot
The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying. -- T. S. Eliot
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree are of equal duration. -- T. S. Eliot
I said to my soul
be still
and
wait
so the darkness
shall be the
light
and the stillness
the
dancing. -- T. S. Eliot
Pray for those who chose and oppose -- T. S. Eliot
Ash on an old man's sleeve / Is all the ash the burnt roses leave, / Dust in the air suspended / Marks the place where a story ended. -- T. S. Eliot
History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern. -- T. S. Eliot
Finding a way to live the simple life is one of life's supreme complications. -- T. S. Eliot
Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy
but speak the word only. -- T. S. Eliot
Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation. -- T. S. Eliot
And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads, And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance, But all dash to and fro in motor cars, Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere. -- T. S. Eliot
Hurry up, please, its time. -- T. S. Eliot
We aim at experience in the particular centres in which alone it is evil. We avoid classification. We do not deny it. But when a man is classified something is lost. -- T. S. Eliot
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. -- T. S. Eliot
Today, you're halfway to 100! Here's to optimism, whether it is realistic or not. Happy 50th birthday! -- T. S. Eliot
The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it. -- T. S. Eliot
Hell is oneself,
Hell is alone. -- T. S. Eliot
I don't know much about gods, but I think the river is a strong, brown god -- T. S. Eliot
Think not forever of yourselves, O Chiefs, nor of your own generation. Think of continuing generations of our families, think of our grandchildren and of those yet unborn, whose faces are coming from beneath the ground. -- T. S. Eliot
The world revolves like ancient women, gathering fuel in vacant lots. -- T. S. Eliot
The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions. -- T. S. Eliot
Thus with most careful devotion Thus with precise attention To detail, interfering preparation Of that which is already prepared Men lighten the knot of confusion Into perfect misunderstanding, Reflecting a pocket-torch of observation ... -- T. S. Eliot
The tendency of liberals is to create bodies of men and women-of all classes-detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion-mob rule. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined. -- T. S. Eliot
If you do not push the boundaries, you will never know where they are. -- T. S. Eliot
There is no water, so things are bad. If there were water, it would be better. But there is no water. -- T. S. Eliot
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in infomation? -- T. S. Eliot
Do I dare Disturb the universe? -- T. S. Eliot
To become what you are not, behave as you do not. -- T. S. Eliot
Because I know that time is time and place is always and only place and what is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place, I rejoice that things are as they are and I renounce the blessed faces and renounce the voice because I cannot hope to turn again. -- T. S. Eliot
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse -- T. S. Eliot
We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union / ( ... ) / In my end is my beginning. -- T. S. Eliot
He who was living is now dead.
We who were living are now dying. -- T. S. Eliot
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation. -- T. S. Eliot
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair; -- T. S. Eliot
Music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but
you are the music
While the music lasts. -- T. S. Eliot
Those who talk of the bible as a monument of English prose are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity. -- T. S. Eliot
Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative. -- T. S. Eliot
In the life of one man, never The same time returns. -- T. S. Eliot
But time past is a time forgotten.
We expect the rise of a new constellation. -- T. S. Eliot
The circle of our understanding is a very restricted area. -- T. S. Eliot
The young feel tired at the end of an action, the old at the beginning. -- T. S. Eliot
Death! I had not thought Death had undone so many -- T. S. Eliot
Ambition fortifies the will of man to become ruler over other men: it operates with deception, cajolery, and violence, it is the action of impurity upon impurity. -- T. S. Eliot
A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance. -- T. S. Eliot
And when all the world came back And the light crept up between the shutters, And you heard the sparrows in the gutters, You had such a vision of the street As the street hardly understands; -- T. S. Eliot
What we know of other people's only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. -- T. S. Eliot
Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake. -- T. S. Eliot
The Rum Turn Tugger is a terrible bore: When you let him in, then he wants to be out; He's always on the wrong side of every door, And as soon as he's at home, then he'd like to get about. -- T. S. Eliot
The usual dog about the town is much inclined to play the clown. -- T. S. Eliot
All time is unreedemable. -- T. S. Eliot
I was too slow a mover to be a boxer. It was much easier to be a poet. -- T. S. Eliot
Whatever you do, don't whimper, but take the consequences. -- T. S. Eliot
A thousand policemen directing traffic cannot tell you why you come or where you go. -- T. S. Eliot
Put on a face to meet the faces that you meet - T S Eliot - used in The Book Of Peach -- T. S. Eliot
A philosophy can and must be worked out with the greatest rigour and discipline in the details, but can ultimately be founded on nothing but faith: and this is the reason, I suspect, why the novelties in philosophy are only in elaboration, and never in fundamentals. -- T. S. Eliot
When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way. -- T. S. Eliot
A good deal of confusion could be avoided, if we refrained from setting before the group, what can be the aim only of the individual; and before society as a whole, what can be the aim only of the group. -- T. S. Eliot
O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination.'
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers. -- T. S. Eliot
I journeyed to London, to the timekept City, Where the River flows, with foreign flotations. There I was told: we have too many churches, And too few chop-houses. -- T. S. Eliot
We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion. -- T. S. Eliot
The greatest proof of Christianity for others is not how far a man can logically analyze his reasons for believing, but how far in practice he will stake his life on his belief. -- T. S. Eliot
Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know What life is, you who hold it in your hands; -- T. S. Eliot
Men tighten the knot of confusion Into perfect misunderstanding. -- T. S. Eliot
I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones. -- T. S. Eliot
In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not. -- T. S. Eliot
An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better. -- T. S. Eliot
And all shall be well and/ All manner of thing shall be well/ By the purification of the motive/ In the ground of our beseeching -- T. S. Eliot
One starts an action simply because one must do something. -- T. S. Eliot
It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is a life. -- T. S. Eliot
Disillusion can become itself an illusion If we rest in it. -- T. S. Eliot
Artistic inevitability lies in the complete adequacy of the external to the emotion. -- T. S. Eliot
The rats are underneath the piles/ The Jew is underneath the lot. -- T. S. Eliot
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And a hundred visions and revisions -- T. S. Eliot
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear -- T. S. Eliot
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation. -- T. S. Eliot
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil. -- T. S. Eliot
This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy. -- T. S. Eliot
Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison. -- T. S. Eliot
Where is the Life we lost in living? -- T. S. Eliot
Death has a hundred hands and walks by a thousand ways. -- T. S. Eliot
We took up
our positions, in obedience to instructions. -- T. S. Eliot
A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good. -- T. S. Eliot
Art never improves, but ... the material of art is never quite the same. -- T. S. Eliot
I must say Bernard Shaw is greatly improved by music. -- T. S. Eliot
We can say of Shakespeare, that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account. -- T. S. Eliot
Sand. Everywhere. In the bed, in the shower, all over the floor. Grrrrr. -- T. S. Eliot
A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give. -- T. S. Eliot
Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other
Who think the same thoughts without need of speech -- T. S. Eliot
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? -- T. S. Eliot
In life there is not time to grieve long. -- T. S. Eliot
Art is the escape from personality. -- T. S. Eliot
Between the vision and the act lies the shadow. -- T. S. Eliot
Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important. -- T. S. Eliot
If you start with a bang, you won't end with a whimper. -- T. S. Eliot
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star. -- T. S. Eliot
In the last few years everything I'd done up to sixty or so has seemed very childish. -- T. S. Eliot
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves. -- T. S. Eliot
Upon the glazen shelves kept watch Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith The army of unalterable law. -- T. S. Eliot
Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it -- T. S. Eliot
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; -- T. S. Eliot
We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now, by suffering. This is the easier victory. -- T. S. Eliot
Again I must remind you that a dog's a dog-a cat's a cat. -- T. S. Eliot
Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult ... The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning. -- T. S. Eliot
For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice. -- T. S. Eliot
Cling, swing, Spring, sing, Swing up into the apple tree. -- T. S. Eliot
life is long between the desire and the spasm. -- T. S. Eliot
Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance,
Admire the moments
Discuss the late events,
Correct our watches by the public clocks.
Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks. -- T. S. Eliot
Shape without form, shade without colour, paralyzed force, gesture without motion ... -- T. S. Eliot
Neither way is better. / Both ways are necessary. / It is also necessary / To make a choice between them. -- T. S. Eliot
People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced. -- T. S. Eliot
Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow -- T. S. Eliot
What life have you if you have not life together? -- T. S. Eliot
Each way means loneliness
and communion. -- T. S. Eliot
To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life. -- T. S. Eliot
We must learn to suffer more. -- T. S. Eliot
We die with the dying;
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them. -- T. S. Eliot
Signs are taken for wonders. / 'We would see a sign!' / The word within a word, unable to speak a word, / Swaddled with darkness. -- T. S. Eliot
It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the 'dear deceit' of beauty. -- T. S. Eliot
Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express. -- T. S. Eliot
They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. -- T. S. Eliot
With cats, some say, one rule is true: Don't speak till you are spoken to. -- T. S. Eliot
Every writer owes something to Holmes.
T.S. Eliot, in The Criterion, 1929 -- T. S. Eliot
You can evade life, but you can not evade Death. -- T. S. Eliot
Time past and time future allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time. -- T. S. Eliot
And the poet who fears to take the risk that what he writes may turn out not to be poetry at all, is a man who has surely failed, who ought to have adopted a less adventurous vocation -- T. S. Eliot
There is no method but to be very intelligent. -- T. S. Eliot
With out some kind of god, man is not very intresting -- T. S. Eliot
That was my way of putting it-not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings. -- T. S. Eliot
Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think; whatever you want, be sure that is what you want; whatever you feel, be sure that is what you feel. -- T. S. Eliot
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn -- T. S. Eliot
War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted. -- T. S. Eliot
Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome. -- T. S. Eliot
Hungry Hatred, will not strive against intelligence self-interest. -- T. S. Eliot
Words strain, crack, and sometime break, under the burden. -- T. S. Eliot
To each individual the world will take on a different connotation of meaning-the important lies in the desire to search for an answer. -- T. S. Eliot
And indeed there will be time to wonder, 'Do I dare?', and 'Do I dare? -- T. S. Eliot
The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end. -- T. S. Eliot
Where there is no temple there shall be no homes. -- T. S. Eliot
The journey not the arrival matters. -- T. S. Eliot
The end is in the beginning. -- T. S. Eliot
You have learned enough to see that cats are much like you and me. -- T. S. Eliot
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a band but a whimper. -- T. S. Eliot
Poetry is not an assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us. -- T. S. Eliot
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. -- T. S. Eliot
What is true, is true only for one time and only for one place. -- T. S. Eliot
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter. -- T. S. Eliot
What is that noise? -- T. S. Eliot
Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living. -- T. S. Eliot
Justice itself tends to be corrupted by political passion. -- T. S. Eliot
If we all were judged according to the consequences
Of all our words and deeds, beyond the intention
And beyond our limited understanding
Of ourselves and others, we should all be condemned. -- T. S. Eliot
Either everything in man can be traced as a development from below, or something must come from above. There is no avoiding that dilemma: you must be either a naturalist or a supernaturalist. -- T. S. Eliot
Yeats was the greatest poet of our times ... certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language. -- T. S. Eliot
If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin. -- T. S. Eliot
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids Sprouting despondently at area gates. -- T. S. Eliot
The True Church can never fail. For it is based upon a rock. -- T. S. Eliot
That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all. -- T. S. Eliot
His laughter tinkled among the teacups. -- T. S. Eliot
There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not. -- T. S. Eliot
I believe the moment of birth Is when we have knowledge of death I believe the season of birth Is the season of sacrifice. -- T. S. Eliot
All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment. -- T. S. Eliot
Every end is a beginning ... And every beginning is an end. -- T. S. Eliot
If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable -- T. S. Eliot
Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair. -- T. S. Eliot
I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. -- T. S. Eliot
Bad poets imitate, good poets steal. -- T. S. Eliot
Sensibility alters from generation to generation in everybody, whether we will or no; but expression is only altered by a man of genius. -- T. S. Eliot
For he will do
As he do do
And there's no doing anything about it! -- T. S. Eliot
In a mind charged with an eager purpose and an unfinished vindictiveness, there is no room for new feelings. -- T. S. Eliot
Truth on our level is a different thing from truth for the jellyfish. -- T. S. Eliot
We have only to conquer
Now, by suffering. This is the easier victory.
Now is the triumph of the cross. -- T. S. Eliot
Humankind cannot bear very much reality. -- T. S. Eliot
Survival is your strength not your shame. -- T. S. Eliot
I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates. -- T. S. Eliot
People are only influenced in the direction in which they want to go, and influence consists largely in making them conscious of their wishes to proceed in that direction. -- T. S. Eliot
Everyone gets the experience. Some get the lesson. -- T. S. Eliot
Success is relative. It is what we make of the mess we have made of things. -- T. S. Eliot
In the mountains, there you feel free. -- T. S. Eliot
not fare well, but fare forward -- T. S. Eliot
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. -- T. S. Eliot
You have to risk going too far to discover just how far you can really go. -- T. S. Eliot
The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates. -- T. S. Eliot
Old men ought to be explorers. -- T. S. Eliot
If the reader says the state of affairs which I wish to bring about is right, or is just, or is inevitable and if this must lead into further deterioration, then I will have no quarrel with it. I might even, in some circumstances, feel obliged to support him. -- T. S. Eliot
Our emotions
Are only "incidents"
In the effort to keep day and night together. -- T. S. Eliot