T. S. Eliot Quotations

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

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

It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.

There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

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 emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

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.

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.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

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.

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

If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?

And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.

If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby 'it.'

Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.

You are the music while the music lasts.

The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

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.

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

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.

The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself.

My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.

It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.

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.

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.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.

Half of 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.

There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords.

Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?

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?

The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.

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

People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.

Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.

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.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.

There is no method but to be very intelligent.

The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.

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

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.

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.

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.

Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.

One of the low on whom assurance sits / As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

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

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

Here we go round the prickly pear / At five o'clock in the morning.

What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?

Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right; decide on what you think is right and stick to it.

My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree / In the cool of the day.

Redeem / The time. Redeem / The unread vision in the higher dream.

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

I suppose some editors are failed writers; but so are most writers.

It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor.

The one thing you can do is to do nothing. Wait . . . You will find that you survive humiliation and hat's an experience of incalculable value.

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.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience ?in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

When a Cat adopts you there is nothing to be done about it except put up with it until the wind changes.

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.

Where is wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow.

At the first turning of the second stair / I turned and saw below / The same shape twisted on the banister.

We must believe that ''emotion recollected in tranquillity'' is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not ''recollected'' and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is ''tranquil'' only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.

The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

And we must think no further of you.

And what the dead had no speech for, when living, they can tell you, being dead: the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel / That questions the distempered part.

The river is within us, the sea is all about us; The sea is the land's edge also

Radio is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome

After the erection of the Chinese Wall of Milton, blank verse has suffered not only arrest but retrogression.

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, / And in short, I was afraid.

Tenants of the house, / Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

O the moon shone bright on Mrs Porter / And on her daughter / They wash their feet in soda water.

Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth.

There's no vocabulary For love within a family, love that's lived in But not looked at, love within the light of which All else is seen, the love within which All other love finds speech. This love is silent.

In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

I like not only to be loved, but to be told I am loved.

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

The awful daring of a moment's surrender which an age of prudence can never retract.

Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers.

Donne, I suppose, was such another / Who found no substitute for sense. / To seize and clutch and penetrate; / Expert beyond experience.