T. S. Eliot Quotations | Page 2

In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in.

It ends not with a bang, but a whimper.

Because I do not hope to turn again / Because I do not hope / Because I do not hope to turn.

Clear the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! take stone from stone and wash them.

And indeed there will be time/ To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"/ Time to turn back and descend the stair,/ With a bald spot in the middle of my hair. . ./ Do I dare/ Disturb the universe?

The dove descending breaks the air / With flame of incandescent terror.

Footfalls echo in the memory, Down the passage which we did not take, Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.

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

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes.

To hear the latest Pole / transmit the Preludes, through his hair and fingertips.

Time past and time future allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time.

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.

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

Men live by forgetting and woman live on memories.

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

To become what you are not, behave as you do not.

The True Church can never fail. For it is based upon a rock.

Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self.

Can we only love Something created in our own imaginations? Are we all in fact unloving and unloveable? Then one is alone, and if one is alone Then lover and beloved are equally unreal And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams.

Survival is your strength not your shame.

Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it

Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter.

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.

People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced.

In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.

My name is only an anagram of toilets.

I am glad you have a Cat, but I do not believe it is So remarkable a cat as My Cat. My Cat is a Lilliecat Hubvously. What a lilliecat it is. There never was such a Lilliecat. Its Name is JELLYORUM and its one Idea is to be Usefull!!

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

Finding a way to live the simple life is one of life's supreme complications.

We had the experience, but we missed the meaning.

No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest- for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.

I believe the moment of birth Is when we have knowledge of death I believe the season of birth Is the season of sacrifice.

Those who arrive at the end of the journey are not those who began.

I learn a great deal by merely observing you, and letting you talk as long as you please, and taking note of what you do not say.

Love compels cruelty To those who do not understand love.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

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

When oxygen and sulphur dioxide are mixed in the presence of a filiament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum.

In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession.

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

It takes so many years to learn that one is dead.

And right action is freedom From past and future also.

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

The poet's mind is in fact 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.

Art is the escape from personality.

A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments.

Maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one's age, and with the same intensity as the emotions of youth.

We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

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

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

The only hope, or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre - To be redeemed from fire by fire.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

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.

At the beach - time you enjoyed wasting, is not wasted.

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

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

We learn what poetry is - if we ever learn - by reading it.

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

To make an end is to make a beginning.

Old men ought to be explorers.

Light Light The visible reminder of Invisible Light.

In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away.

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

The end is where we start from.

I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

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

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.

Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

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

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

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

April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.

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

The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions.

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

It is not enough to understand what we ought to be, unless we know what we are; and we do not understand what we are, unless we know what we ought to be.

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.

The circle of our understanding is a very restricted area.

Hurry up, please, its time.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word / Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.

The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.

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

Between the vision and the act lies the shadow.

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

Distracted from distraction by distraction

The majority of mankind is lazyminded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

At the still point, there the dance is.

Disillusion can become itself an illusion If we rest in it.

Home is where one starts from.

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

Everyone gets the experience. Some get the lesson.

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.

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.