Top 100 Quotes About T S Eliot
#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 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.
T. S. Eliot
#7. 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
#8. It takes so many years to learn that one is dead.
T. S. Eliot
#9. I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.
T. S. Eliot
#10. Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T. S. Eliot
#11. Men dislike being awakened from their death in life.
T. S. Eliot
#12. Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it.
T. S. Eliot
#13. I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
T. S. Eliot
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. He laughed like an irresponsible foetus.
T. S. Eliot
#19. 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
#20. Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.
T. S. Eliot
#21. We do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on.
T. S. Eliot
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.
T. S. Eliot
#27. 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
#29. 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
#30. Any religion is forever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion.
T. S. Eliot
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment.
T. S. Eliot
#36. 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
#37. My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.
T. S. Eliot
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. It is certain that a book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.
T. S. Eliot
#41. 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
#42. We do not pass through the same door twice Or return to the door through which we did not pass
T. S. Eliot
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. There will be time to murder and create.
T. S. Eliot
#46. Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.
T. S. Eliot
#47. Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T. S. Eliot
#48. 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
#49. I can show you fear in a handful of dust
T. S. Eliot
#50. Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
T. S. Eliot
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Poetry consists in so rendering concrete objects that the emotions produced by the objects shall arise in the reader ... .
T. S. Eliot
#54. Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
T. S. Eliot
#55. This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T. S. Eliot
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. My mind may be American but my heart is British.
T. S. Eliot
#59. 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
#60. The lot of man is ceaseless labor, Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder.
T. S. Eliot
#61. 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
#62. The pain of living and the drug of dreams
curl up the small soul in the window seat.
T. S. Eliot
#63. Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity
T. S. Eliot
#64. 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
#65. The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.
T. S. Eliot
#66. The soul of Man must quicken to creation.
T. S. Eliot
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand.
T. S. Eliot
#72. The last act is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the wrong reason.
T. S. Eliot
#73. 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
#74. The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without.
T. S. Eliot
#75. 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
#76. There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#77. The young feel tired at the end of an action, the old at the beginning.
T. S. Eliot
#78. 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
#80. The great ages did not contain the best talent, they wasted less.
T. S. Eliot
#81. We didn't have the day-in, day-out knowledge of each other that most mothers and daughters have. It's not like she was a stranger; we had too much history for that. But at the same time, I couldn't say I knew her well. Or at least well enough to see her thoughts.
Eliot Schrefer
#82. We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.
Virginia Woolf
#83. Datta, dayadhvam, damyata
(Give, sympathize, control)
T. S. Eliot
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
T. S. Eliot
#88. To make an end is to make a beginning.
T. S. Eliot
#89. Both T.S. Eliot and I like to play, but I like to play euchre, while he likes to play Eucharist.
Robert Frost
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. The communication/of the dead is tongued with fire beyond/the language of the living
The Little Gidding
T. S. Eliot
#94. We learn what poetry is - if we ever learn - by reading it.
T. S. Eliot
#95. 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
#97. Creativity is contagious. And so is banality. Criticism is an art in itself. Don't let the dullness around destroy the creativity within. T.S. Eliot said, "honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry." Good to remember ...
Elif Shafak
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. What we know of other people's only our memory of the moments during which we knew them.
T. S. Eliot
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