T. S. Eliot Quotations | Page 3

Any religion is forever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion.

life is long between the desire and the spasm.

As we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated of dead and living.

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

The journey, Not the destination matters...

What is true, is true only for one time and only for one place.

Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. Old men ought to be explorers Here or there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise.

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

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now.

History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us... and we drown.

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

The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.

One thing you cannot know: The sudden extinction of every alternative, The unexpected crash of the iron cataract. You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it. You only know what it is not to hope: You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless Unrecognized by other men, though sometimes by each other.

The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started.

When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.

A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after - and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.

What is this self-inside us, this silent observer, severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us, and urge us onto futile activity, and in the end, judge us still more severely for the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?

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.

I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare.

time past and time future what might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.

Words strain, crack, and sometime break, under the burden.

Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, Falls the shadow.

The darkness declares the glory of the light.

For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice.

Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think; whatever you want, be sure that is what you want; whatever you feel, be sure that is what you feel.

not fare well, but fare forward

Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison.

Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste and end by debauching it.

Destiny ... a word which means more than we can find any definitions for. It is a word which can have no meaning in a mechanical universe: if that which is wound up must run down, what destiny is there in that? Destiny is not necessitarianism, and it is not caprice: it is something essentially meaningful. Each man has his destiny, though some men are undoubtedly "men of destiny" in a sense in which most men are not.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative.

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.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap And seeing that it was a soft October night Curled once about the house, and fell asleep

The destination cannot be described; / You will know very little until you get there; / You will journey blind.

So the lover must struggle for words.

For most of us, there is only the unattended Moment, the moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts

The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man

Time present and time past / are both perhaps present in time future.

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

In a mind charged with an eager purpose and an unfinished vindictiveness, there is no room for new feelings.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

So I find words I never thought to speak In streets I never thought I should revisit When I left my body on a distant shore.

If one has to earn a living, therefore, the safest occupation is that most remote from the arts.

As a rule, with me an unfinished [idea] is a thing that might as well be rubbed out. It's better, if there's something good in it that I might make use of elsewhere, to leave it at the back of my mind than on paper in a drawer. If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing but if it's in the memory it becomes transformed into something else.

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

For you know only a heap of broken images

Turn things you've always wanted to do, into things you've done

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Men tighten the knot of confusion Into perfect misunderstanding.

Only through time time is conquered

It is worth dying to find out what life is.

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

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

The tendency of liberals is to create bodies of men and women-of all classes-detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion-mob rule. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.

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

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

If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable

People are only influenced in the direction in which they want to go, and influence consists largely in making them conscious of their wishes to proceed in that direction.

The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways.

If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.

I suspect that in our loathing of totalitarianism, there is infused a good deal of admiration for its efficiency.

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

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.

The old should be explorers, be curious, risk transgression, explore oldness itself.

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.

Everyone's alone - or so it seems to me. They make noises, and think they are talking to each other; They make faces, and think they understand each other. And I'm sure they don't. Is that a delusion?

I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me, I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.

With a poem you can say 'I got my feeling into words for myself. I now have the equivalent in words for that much of what I have felt.'

Humankind can't stand too much reality.

The definition of hell is a place where nothing connects with nothing.

Good poets borrow, great poets steal

In the life of one man, never The same time returns.

If we all were judged according to the consequences Of all our words and deeds, beyond the intention And beyond our limited understanding Of ourselves and others, we should all be condemned.

A national culture, if it is to flourish, should be a constellation of cultures, the constitutes of which, benefiting each other, benefit the whole.

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.

All time is unreedemable.

His laughter tinkled among the teacups.

He laughed like an irresponsible foetus.

To country people Cows are mild, And flee from any stick they throw; But I’m a timid town bred child, And all the cattle seem to know.

In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light. We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and ecstasy is too much pain.

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

No place of grace for those who avoid the Face. No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the Voice.

One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet is the way in which a poet borrows. 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 good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.

With out some kind of god, man is not very intresting

What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.

Sensibility alters from generation to generation in everybody, whether we will or no; but expression is only altered by a man of genius.

All cases are unique and very similar to others.

You have learned enough to see that cats are much like you and me.

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

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

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion,

If you do not push the boundaries, you will never know where they are.

In life there is not time to grieve long.