T. S. Eliot Quotations | Page 4

There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience.

Our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and of our visible, sensible world.

In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not.

The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o'clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps.

Men dislike being awakened from their death in life.

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

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.

Sister, mother And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea, Suffer me not to be separated And let my cry come unto Thee.

The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in the end it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it. At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means?

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.

War among men defiles this world.

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, ... .

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.

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

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.

It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good.

Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow

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.

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

What profession is more trying than that of author? After you finish a piece of work it only seems good to you for a few weeks; or if it seems good at all you are convinced that it is the last you will be able to write; and if it seems bad you wonder whether everything you have done isn’t poor stuff really; and it is one kind of agony while you are writing, and another kind when you aren’t.

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

The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.

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.

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.

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

Nothing pleases people more than to go on thinking what they have always thought, and at the same time imagine that they are thinking something new and daring: it combines the advantage of security and the delight of adventure.

My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand.

Envy is everywhere. Who is without envy? And most people Are unaware or unashamed of being envious.

People find a way in which they can say something.

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

The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to God. 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 cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

All time is eternal, moving inexorably toward an end which we believe is a result of our actions, but over which our control is mere illusion.

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

I must tell you that I should really like to think there's something wrong with me- Because, if there isn't, then there's something wrong with the world itself-and that's much more frightening! That would be terrible. So I'd rather believe there is something wrong with me, that could be put right.

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.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

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

The usual dog about the town is much inclined to play the clown.

We fight to keep something alive rather than in the expectation that anything will triumph.

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

No generation is interested in art in quite the same way as any other; each generation, like each individual, brings to the contemplation of art its own categories of appreciation, makes its own demands upon art, and has its own uses for art.

We can say of Shakespeare, that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.

He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience.

The soul of Man must quicken to creation.

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.

and now you live dispersed on ribbon roads, And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance, But all dash to and fro in motor cars, Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.

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

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

Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not.

We do not pass through the same door twice Or return to the door through which we did not pass

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

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

Friendship should be more than biting time can sever.

In a world of fugitives the one who stays home will seem to be running away

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.

Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.

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.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

O father, father Gone from us, lost to us, The church lies bereft, Alone, Desecrated, desolated. And the heathen shall build On the ruins Their world without God. I see it. I see it.

The great ages did not contain the best talent, they wasted less.

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. Through the unknown, remembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple-tree Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea.

Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws? She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.

I've been born, and once is enough.

With cats, some say, one rule is true: Don't speak till you are spoken to.

Dear Mother, I am getting on nicely in my work at the bank, and like it ... I want to find out something about the science of money while I am at it; it is an extraordinarily interesting subject ...

Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.

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

The fool,fixed in his folly,may think He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

A wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude toward God.

Ash on an old man's sleeve / Is all the ash the burnt roses leave, / Dust in the air suspended / Marks the place where a story ended.

Uncorseted, her friendly bust Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.

A woman drew her long black hair out tight, And fiddled whisper music on those strings, And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings, And crawled head downward down a blackened wall.

There will be time to murder and create.

When the gods know that a god hath fallen, With this kindly feeling They do encourage him-- Be thou a god again and again.

Cold Mountain Buddhas Han Shan Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness be dancing. Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning. The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry, The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony Of death and birth.

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

When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smooths her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone.

The role of art is not to express the personality but to overcome it.

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

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

Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.

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

You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; They called me the hyacinth girl.' —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Od' und leer das Meer.

In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.

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.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky

Do I dare disturb the universe?

The naming of cats is a difficult matter. It isn't just one of your holiday games. You may think at first I'm mad as a hatter. When I tell you a cat must have three different names...

You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends, And how, how rare and strange it is, to find In 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 gives Those qualities upon which friendship lives. How much it means that I say this to you- Without these friendships-life, what cauchemar!

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it

One starts an action simply because one must do something.

Every moment is a fresh beginning.

In my beginning is my end.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you I will show you fear in a handful of dust