Words matter. These are the best T. S. Eliot Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.
My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.
There is no method but to be very intelligent.
Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.
In my beginning is my end.
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.
Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
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.
The Nobel is a ticket to one’s own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.
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.
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.
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.
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.
You are the music while the music lasts.
So the lover must struggle for words.
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.
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.
It’s strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
Art never improves, but… the material of art is never quite the same.
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.
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.
Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.
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.
Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm, retreating to the corner of arm and knee, eager to be reassured, taking pleasure in the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree.
Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?
It’s not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.
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.
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.
I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
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 tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.
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.
Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.
We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.
It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.
Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm, retreating to the corner of arm and knee, eager to be reassured, taking pleasure in the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree.
April is the cruellest month.
The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself.
