Top 588 Quotes & Sayings by T. S. Eliot
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American poet T. S. Eliot.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.
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.
I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.
The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.
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.
Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
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.
So the lover must struggle for words.
Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.
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.
In my beginning is my end.
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
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.
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.
It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.
You are the music while the music lasts.
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
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.
I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.
Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.
This love is silent.
Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.
It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.
My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.
There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.
Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
There is no method but to be very intelligent.
Business today consists in persuading crowds.
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.
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?
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.
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.
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.
If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
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.
April is the cruellest month.
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.
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.
Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.
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.
Home is where one starts from.
The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
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.
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.
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