Top 100 T. S. Eliot Quotes
#1. 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
#2. It takes so many years to learn that one is dead.
T. S. Eliot
#3. I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.
T. S. Eliot
#4. 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
#5. We do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on.
T. S. Eliot
#6. 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
#7. My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.
T. S. Eliot
#8. Poetry consists in so rendering concrete objects that the emotions produced by the objects shall arise in the reader ... .
T. S. Eliot
#9. 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
#10. The pain of living and the drug of dreams
curl up the small soul in the window seat.
T. S. Eliot
#11. My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand.
T. S. Eliot
#12. 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
#13. To make an end is to make a beginning.
T. S. Eliot
#14. The communication/of the dead is tongued with fire beyond/the language of the living
The Little Gidding
T. S. Eliot
#16. Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.
T. S. Eliot
#17. Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
T. S. Eliot
#19. Your burden is not to clear your conscience
But to learn how to bear the burdens on your conscience.
T. S. Eliot
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. I am no prophet - and here's no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
T. S. Eliot
#25. I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God.
T. S. Eliot
#26. 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
#27. Finding a way to live the simple life is one of life's supreme complications.
T. S. Eliot
#28. Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images,
T. S. Eliot
#29. 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
#30. The past and future / Are conquered, and reconciled.
T. S. Eliot
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. In the life of one man, never The same time returns.
T. S. Eliot
#34. Truth on our level is a different thing from truth for the jellyfish.
T. S. Eliot
#35. 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
#36. This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.
T. S. Eliot
#37. 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
#38. Turn things you've always wanted to do, into things you've done
T. S. Eliot
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. The definition of hell is a place where nothing connects with nothing.
T. S. Eliot
#42. 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
#43. Envy is everywhere. Who is without envy? And most people Are unaware or unashamed of being envious.
T. S. Eliot
#44. All cases are unique, and very similar to others.
T. S. Eliot
#46. A christian martyrdom is never an accident, for Saints are not made by accident.
T. S. Eliot
#47. 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
#50. We had the experience, but we missed the meaning.
T. S. Eliot
#51. Every moment is a new and shocking transvaluation of all we have ever been.
T. S. Eliot
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
T. S. Eliot
#56. 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
#57. The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree are of equal duration.
T. S. Eliot
#58. Heretic ... is a person who seizes upon a truth and pushes it to the point at which it becomes a falsehood.
T. S. Eliot
#59. Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place ...
T. S. Eliot
#60. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other
Who think the same thoughts without need of speech
T. S. Eliot
#67. 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
#68. And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
T. S. Eliot
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Between the desire
And the spasm,
Between the potency
And the existence,
Between the essence
And the descent,
Falls the Shadow.
T. S. Eliot
#74. 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
#75. If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
T. S. Eliot
#76. It is impossible to say just what I mean!
T. S. Eliot
#77. 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
#78. In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not.
T. S. Eliot
#79. 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
#80. And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
T. S. Eliot
#81. 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
#82. To become what you are not, behave as you do not.
T. S. Eliot
#83. And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
T. S. Eliot
#84. We can say of Shakespeare, that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.
T. S. Eliot
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. One starts an action simply because one must do something.
T. S. Eliot
#92. 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
#93. Poetry is not an assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.
T. S. Eliot
#94. Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
T. S. Eliot
#95. The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.
T. S. Eliot
#96. The work of creation is never without travail.
T. S. Eliot
#98. Between the vision and the act lies the shadow.
T. S. Eliot
#99. 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
#100. We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union / ( ... ) / In my end is my beginning.
T. S. Eliot
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