T. S. Eliot Quotes (109 Quotes)

Footfalls echo in the memory, Down the passage which we did not take, Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.

And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.

The awful daring of a moment's surrender which an age of prudence can never retract.

This is the death of earth.

In my beginning is my end.

Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.

Life is very long.

The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.

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

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.

It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.

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.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

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.

The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

Home is where one starts from.

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.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum-
Names that never belong to more than one cat.

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.

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

So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good so far as we do evil or good, we are human and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing at least we exist.

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?

O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.

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.

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.

My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.

At the still point of the turning world.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.

The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.

Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.

I grow old... I grow old... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled... Do I dare to eat a peach.

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.

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.

Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Only through time time is conquered.

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.

If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it."

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.

However certain our expectation The moment foreseen may be unexpected When it arrives.

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

There is no method but to be very intelligent.

The poetry does not matter.

At the end we preferred to travel all
night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears,
saying
That this was all folly.