T. S. Eliot

Quotes

• “Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, advancing boldly, sudde...”
• “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an es...”
• “You are not here to verify,instruct yourself, or inform curiosityor carry report. You are here to kneelwhere prayer has ...”
• “As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ev...”
• “It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored in climate that seem to me the happiest bu...”
• “It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored climate that seem to me the happiest but t...”
• “The poet's mind is ... a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings phrases images which remain there ...”
• “No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest. For it is part of educ...”
• “It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us to escape not from our own time - for we are bound by that...”
• “The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, ...”
• “Genuine blasphemy genuine in spirit and not purely verbal is the product of partial belief and is as impossible to th...”
• “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 - bu...”
• “The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity sluggish and indomitable as a glacier will mitigate the most violent and depr...”
• “No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and m...”
• “A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its impo...”
• “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the pl...”
• “The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always asked to do things and you are not yet decrepit eno...”
• “Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, an...”
• “Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have ...”
• “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'...”
• “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 an...”
• “April is the cruellest month breeding Lilacs out of the dead land mixing memory and desire stirring dull roots with S...”
• “April is the crudest month breeding Lilacs out of the dead land mixing Memory and desire stirring Dull roots with spr...”
• “You have now learned to see That cats are much like you and me And other people whom we find Possessed of various types ...”
• “To do the useful thing to say the courageous thing to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's li...”
• “Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know...”
• “The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible.”
• “What we call the beginning is often an end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
• “Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.”
• “When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.”
• “The historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence.”
• “When a great poet has lived certain things have been done once for all and cannot be achieved again.”
• “An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better a little better.”
• “Should I after tea and cakes and ices have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?”
• “I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.”
• “In the last few years everything I'd done up to sixty or so has seemed very childish.”
• “The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”
• “Birth copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks.”
• “Success is relative: It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.”
• “We understand the ordinary business of living, We know how to work the machine”
• “Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.”
• “It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.”
• “The young feel tired at the end of an action The old at the beginning.”
• “I suppose some editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.”
• “What is actual is actual only for one time. And only for one place.”
• “What is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place.”
• “I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.”
• “This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.”
• “People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced.”
• “One starts an action simply because one must do something.”