Top 588 Quotes & Sayings by T. S. Eliot - Page 3

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.

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

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

In life there is not time to grieve long.

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

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

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?

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

Distracted from distraction by distraction

In the mountains, there you feel free.

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

Do I dare disturb the universe?

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?

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.

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

Teach us to care and not to care

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.

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.'

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

To make an end is to make a beginning.

Between the vision and the act lies the shadow.

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

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

You can evade life, but you can not evade Death.

My name is only an anagram of toilets.

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.

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

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.

The young feel tired at the end of an action, the old at the beginning.

In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing

People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced.

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.

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.

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

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

What we know of other people's only our memory of the moments during which we knew them.

Where is the Life we lost in living?

The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.

Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.

Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison.

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.

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God. . . . So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

And right action is freedom From past and future also.

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

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

It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous. Resign yourself to be the fool you are... ...We must always take risks. That is our destiny.

Unreal friendship may turn to real But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended

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

The greatest proof of Christianity for others is not how far a man can logically analyze his reasons for believing, but how far in practice he will stake his life on his belief.

But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.