A Quote by T. S. Eliot
People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.
Related Quotes
Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties -- one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened.
These claims [about me of inappropriate conduct with women] are all fabricated. They're pure fiction and they're outright lies. These events never, ever happened and the people said them meekly fully understand.
I know great actors whom nothing has ever happened for.
The events of September 11 and what has happened since have made people understand that even a small, distant and far away country like Afghanistan cannot be left to break up into anarchy and chaos without consequences for the whole world.
Ordinary men, to whom all things are possible, don't often, if ever, think of Heaven. It is a name, and nothing more, and they are content to wait and let things be, but to those who are doomed to be shut out for ever you cannot think what it means, you cannot guess or measure the terrible endless longing to see the gates opened, and to be able to join the white figures within.
Nothing happens accidentally or in such a way that you cannot learn from it; you must understand this at once, for this is how your trust grows in the Lord whom you have chosen to follow.
You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.
The importance and unimportance of the self cannot be exaggerated.
Our lives are structured by our memories of events. Event X happened just before the big Paris vacation. I was doing Y in the first summer after I learned to drive. Z happened the weekend after I landed my first job. We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events.
Death is the liberator of him whom freedom cannot release, the physician of him whom medicine cannot cure, and the comforter of him whom time cannot console.
Understand the causes of terror? Yes, we should try, but let there be no moral ambiguity about this: nothing could ever justify the events of September 11 and it is to turn justice on its head to pretend it could
Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand [the Holocaust] is almost to justify...no normal human being will ever be able to identify with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and endless others. This dismays us, and at the same time gives us a sense of relief, because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. They are non-human words and deeds, really counter-human.
No one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring.
This world has been connected...tied to the darkness...soon to be completely eclipsed...there is very much to learn...you understand so little...a meaningless effort...one who knows nothing cannot understand nothing.
A novel makes it possible to understand not just events, but the people who control the events; not only their choices, but also their motives.
The world is filled with people who understand. I personally value people who don't understand. People who understand have nothing more to learn. People who don't understand have hope. Do you understand?
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