T.S Eliot Quotes

The young feel tired at the end of an action The old at the beginning.

We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.

It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us to escape not from our own time - for we are bound by that - but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

Poetry, if it is not to be a lifeless repetition of forms, must be constantly exploring "the frontiers of the spirit." But these frontiers are not like the surveys of geographical explorers, conquered once for all and settled. The frontiers of the spirit are more like the jungle which, unless continuously kept under control, is always ready to encroach and eventually obliterate the cultivated area.

The dove descending breaks the airWith flame of incandescent terrorOf which the tongues declareThe one discharge from sin and error.The only hope, or else despairLies in the choice of pyre or pyre-To be redeemed from fire by fire.Who then devised the torment? Love.Love is the unfamiliar NameBehind the hands that woveThe intolerable shirt of flameWhich human power cannot remove.We only live, only suspireConsumed by either fire or fire.

In the last few years everything I'd done up to sixty or so has seemed very childish.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always asked to do things and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.

A christian martyrdom is never an accident, for Saints are not made by accident.

Poetry is a mug's game.

The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity sluggish and indomitable as a glacier will mitigate the most violent and depress the most exalted revolution.

Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird meaning death

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spentIf the unheard, unspokenWord is unspoken, unheard;Still is the spoken word, the Word unheard,The Word without a word, the Word withinThe world and for the world;And the light shone in the darkness andAgainst the Word the unstilled world still whirledAbout the center of the silent Word.Oh my people, what have I done unto thee.Where shall the word be found, where shall the wordResound? Not here, there is not enough silence

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.

My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.t 'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.t 'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?t 'I never know what you are thinking. Think.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city ?Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”What will you answer? “We all dwell togetherTo make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

This is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.

How wild it was, to let it be.

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.

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

Your burden is not to clear your conscienceBut to learn how to bear the burdens on your conscience.

The Rum Tum Tugger is a Curious Cat:If you offer him pheasant he would rather have grouse.If you put him in a house he would much prefer a flat,If you put him in a flat then he'd rather have a house.If you set him on a mouse then he only wants a rat,If you set him on a rat then he'd rather chase a mouse.Yes the Rum Tum Tugger is a Curious Cat -And there isn't any call for me to shout it:For he will doAs he do doAnd there's no doing anything about it!

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.

If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence

Unreal friendship may turn to real But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended

One starts an action simply because one must do something.

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; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at times, the Fool.

Destiny waits in the hand of god, shaping the still unshapen..

It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored climate that seem to me the happiest but those in which a long stroke of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both.

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.

The historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence.

Time for you and time for me,tAnd time yet for a hundred indecisions,tAnd for a hundred visions and revisions,tBefore the taking of a toast and tea.

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.

The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.

For he will doAs he do doAnd there's no doing anything about it!

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.

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

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

About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right; and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong.

You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,And how, how rare and strange it is, to findIn a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,(For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? you are not blind! How keen you are!)To find a friend who has these qualities,Who has, and givesThose qualities upon which friendship lives.How much it means that I say this to you-Without these friendships-life, what cauchemar!

April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory and desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain.Winter kept us warm, coveringEarth in forgetful snow, feedingA little life with dried tubers.Summer surprised us, coming over the StarnbergerseeWith a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's,My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,And I was frightened. He said, Marie,Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.In the mountains, there you feel free.I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

LightLightThe visible reminder of Invisible Light.

A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better a little better.

The dripping blood our only drink,The bloody flesh our only food:In spite of which we like to thinkThat we are sound, substantial flesh and blood--Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

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.

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

There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.

The poet's mind is ... 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.

In my beginning is my end.

Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

All cases are unique and very similar to others.

We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.

If time and space, as sages say,Are things which cannot be,The sun which does not feel decayNo greater is than we.So why, Love, should we ever prayTo live a century?The butterfly that lives a dayHas lived eternity.

Do I dare Disturb the universe?

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.