Top 100 Eliot's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. The days of chivalry are not gone, notwithstanding Burke's grand dirge over them; they live still in that far-off worship paid by many a youth and man to the woman of whom he never dreams that he shall touch so much as her little finger or the hem of her robe.
George Eliot
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.
T. S. Eliot
#8. He bore the same sort of resemblance to his mother that our loving memory of a friend's face often bears to the face itself: the lines were all more generous, the smile brighter, the expression heartier. If
George Eliot
#9. 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
#10. It takes so many years to learn that one is dead.
T. S. Eliot
#11. Things look dim to old folks: they'd need have some young eyes about 'em, to let 'em know the world's the same as it used to be.
George Eliot
#12. I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.
T. S. Eliot
#13. Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T. S. Eliot
#14. Men dislike being awakened from their death in life.
T. S. Eliot
#15. Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it.
T. S. Eliot
#16. Needle in a haystack's easy - just bring a magnet."
Eliot stared witheringly at Hardison. "You take the poetry out of everything."
"Says the man who'd just punch the haystack.
Keith R.A. DeCandido
#17. But certain winds will make men's temper bad.
George Eliot
#18. I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
T. S. Eliot
#19. 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
#20. In poor Rosamond's mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.
George Eliot
#21. I'm living in fiction. It's perfectly okay to be in love with any and all fictional boyfriends, even if they aren't yours.
Anne Eliot
#22. 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
#23. Charlie snorted. Sure. Insta-friends with one of the world's most famous rock stars. ZERO weirdness. Check. And you're not my type either, dude.
Anne Eliot
#24. A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills.
George Eliot
#25. 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
#26. He laughed like an irresponsible foetus.
T. S. Eliot
#27. 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
#28. Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.
T. S. Eliot
#29. We do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on.
T. S. Eliot
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. when a man's said what he means, he'd better stop, for th' ale 'ull be none the better for stannin'. An
George Eliot
#33. 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
#34. I tell you there isn't a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it's bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better ha been left to the men.
George Eliot
#35. He was unique to her among men because he's impressed her as being not her admirer her superior. In some mysterious way he was becoming a part of her conscience as one woman who's nature is an object of reverential belief may become a new conscience to a man.
George Eliot
#36. That was an evil terror
an ugly inmate to have found a nestling-place in Godfrey's kindly disposition; but no disposition is a security from evil wishes to a man whose happiness hangs on duplicity.
George Eliot
#37. But we all know the wag's definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance.
George Eliot
#38. There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.
T. S. Eliot
#39. We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.
George Eliot
#40. 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
#41. Her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible, - or from one of our elder poets, - in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper.
George Eliot
#42. A woman's rank
Lies in the fulness of her womanhood:
Therein alone she is royal.
George Eliot
#44. 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
#45. Any religion is forever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion.
T. S. Eliot
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment.
T. S. Eliot
#51. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened. - T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton
Blake Crouch
#52. My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.
T. S. Eliot
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. It is certain that a book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.
T. S. Eliot
#56. Ah, I often think it's wi' th' old folks as it is wi' the babies; they're satisfied wi' looking, no matter what they're looking at. It's God A'mighty's way o' quietening 'em, I reckon, afore they go to sleep.
George Eliot
#57. There's truth in wine, and there may be some in gin and muddy beer; but whether it's truth worth my knowing, is another question.
George Eliot
#58. 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
#59. Eliot had only one pair of shoes, black ones. They had a crackle finish as a result of an experiment. Eliot once tried to polish them with Johnson's Glo-Coat, which was a floorwax, not intended for shoes.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#60. We do not pass through the same door twice Or return to the door through which we did not pass
T. S. Eliot
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. There will be time to murder and create.
T. S. Eliot
#64. Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.
T. S. Eliot
#65. Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T. S. Eliot
#66. 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
#67. I can show you fear in a handful of dust
T. S. Eliot
#68. Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Eliot's character; vanity of person and of situation.
Jane Austen
#69. Maybe you've got the patience to work out some complicated, long-term, ironic way to get back at the people who've wronged you, but that's you.
Greg Cox
#70. It's a different thing to write a love story now than in the time of Jane Austen, Eliot, or Tolstoy. One of the problems is that once divorce is possible, once break-ups are possible, it can all become a little less momentous.
Mona Simpson
#71. Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
T. S. Eliot
#72. 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
#73. Everybody has their own idea of what's a poet. Robert Frost, President Johnson, T.S.Eliot, Rudolf Valentino - they're all poets. I like to think of myself as the one who carries the light bulb.
Bob Dylan
#74. Poetry consists in so rendering concrete objects that the emotions produced by the objects shall arise in the reader ... .
T. S. Eliot
#75. A man's a man. But when you see a king, you see the work of many thousand men.
George Eliot
#76. Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
T. S. Eliot
#77. This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T. S. Eliot
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. My mind may be American but my heart is British.
T. S. Eliot
#81. Solomon's Proverbs, I think, have omitted to say, that as the sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendos.
George Eliot
#82. Some say that I should settle down, go slower and not push so hard, so quickly for such transformational change. To them, I say that you misunderstand the size of the problems we face, the strength of the status quo and the urgency of the people's desire for change.
Eliot Spitzer
#83. 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
#84. The lot of man is ceaseless labor, Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder.
T. S. Eliot
#85. There's times when the crockery seems alive, an' flies out o' your hand like a bird. It's like the glass, sometimes, 'ull crack as it stands. What is to be broke will be broke.
George Eliot
#86. 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
#87. The pain of living and the drug of dreams
curl up the small soul in the window seat.
T. S. Eliot
#88. It's but little good you'll do a-watering the last year's crops
George Eliot
#89. Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity
T. S. Eliot
#90. Mitt Romney's primary season embrace of the social and economic agenda of the more rabid elements of his party doomed him, especially the shrill immigration rhetoric and the harshly insensitive theory that no additional sacrifice or contribution should be sought from those at the top.
Eliot Spitzer
#91. 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
#92. The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.
T. S. Eliot
#93. The soul of Man must quicken to creation.
T. S. Eliot
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. The fundamental message is self-righteous, and it takes this form: 'T. S. Eliot is a homophobe and I am not. Therefore, I am a better person than Eliot.' To which the proper response is: 'But T. S. Eliot could really write, and you can't.
Ken Wilber
#97. What T. S. Eliot said: When all is said and done the writer may realize that he has wasted his youth and wrecked his health for nothing.
Jenny Offill
#98. My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand.
T. S. Eliot
#99. The last act is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the wrong reason.
T. S. Eliot
#100. 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
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