249 Quotes by 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.

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 that they cause 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.

Accident is design
And design is accident
In a cloud of unknowing.

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.

Truth on our level is a different thing from truth for the jellyfish.

This love is silent.

Every moment is a fresh beginning.

Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.

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.

Poetry is not an assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.

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.

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.

Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.

My mind may be American but my heart is British.

Never commit yourself to a cheese without having first examined it.

The darkness declares the glory of light.

No artist produces great art by a deliberate attempt to express his own personality.

I am moved by fancies that are curled, around these images and cling, the notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.

It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the 'dear deceit' of beauty.

War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.

Artistic inevitability lies in the complete adequacy of the external to the emotion.

The lot of man is ceaseless labor, Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder.

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.

Do I dare Disturb the universe?

Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment.

Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other Who think the same thoughts without need of speech.

We understand the ordinary business of living,
We know how to work the machine.

A book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.

We took up
our positions, in obedience to instructions.

A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.

All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment.

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.

Every moment is a new and shocking transvaluation of all we have ever been.

Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.

I say to you: Make perfect your will. I say: take no thought of the harvest, But only of proper sowing.

Signs are taken for wonders. 'We would see a sign!' The word within a word, unable to speak a word, Swaddled with darkness.

A tradition without intelligence is not worth having.

The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely.

Tradition: how the vitality of the past enriches the life of the present.

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.

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? .

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.

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.

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is a life.

Today, you're halfway to 100! Here's to optimism, whether it is realistic or not. Happy 50th birthday!

Those who talk of the bible as a monument of English prose are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.

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.

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.

I was too slow a mover to be a boxer. It was much easier to be a poet.

To each individual the world will take on a different connotation of meaning-the important lies in the desire to search for an answer.

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.

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.

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.

If you start with a bang, you won't end with a whimper.

We see the light but see not whence it comes. O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!

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.

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be: am an attendant lord, one that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two, advise the prince.

Teach us to care and not to care.

Art is the escape from personality.

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.

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.

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues.

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.

Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.

I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal.

If you want it you must obtain it by great labor.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.

Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.

The naming of cats is a difficult matter.

There is no such thing as a lost cause, because there is no such thing as a gained cause.

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.

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.

All dash to and fro in motor cars. Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.

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.

Fading, fading: strength beyond hope and despair climbing the third stair. Lord, I am not worthy Lord, I am not worthy but speak the word only.

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.

I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls ... Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead.

A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments.

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.

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre -

To be redeemed from fire by fire.

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, ... .

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.

Not less of love, but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the Future as well as the past.

Only through time time is conquered.

And right action is freedom From past and future also.

Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.

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.

The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end.

If we really want to pray we must first learn to listen, for in the silence of the heart God speaks.

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, and I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, and in short, I was afraid.

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.

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.

We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors' victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.

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.

But at my back from time to time I hear The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water.

You will find that you survive humiliation. And that's an experience of incalculable value.

The end is where we start from.

Music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts.

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.

A thousand policemen directing traffic cannot tell you why you come or where you go.

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.

Dayodhuam: I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.

I can connect Nothing with nothing.

I think we are in rats' alley Where the dead men lost their bones.

There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.

There will be time to murder and create.

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.

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.

Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it.

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.

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.

Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.

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.

Upon the glazen shelves kept watch Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith The army of unalterable law.

Till Human voices wake us, and we drown.

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.

Shape without form, shade without color, Paralyzed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom Remember us-if at all-not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.

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.

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.

Success is relative. It is what we make of the mess we have made of things.

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair- Lean on a garden urn- Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

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.

I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

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.

Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?'
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag --
It's so elegant
So intelligent.

When the whole world is running headlong towards the precipice, one who walks in the opposite direction is looked at as being crazy.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.