Thomas Stearns Eliot Quotes (86 Quotes)

I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled.

Shall I part my hair behind Do I dare to eat a peach I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

That was my way of putting itnot very satisfactory A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings.

Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.

The one thing you can do is to do nothing. Wait ... You will find that you survive humiliation and that's an experience of incalculable value.

If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, you must accept the terms it offers you.

Upon the glazen shelves kept watch Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith The army of unalterable law.

Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

And I must borrow every changing shape To find expression.

Where does one go from a world of insanity Somewhere on the other side of despair.

Birth, copulation, and death. That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks.

I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids Sprouting despondently at area gates.

I think we are in rats' alley Where the dead men lost their bones.

Old men ought to be explorers Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and the empty desolation ... In my end is my beginning.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives.

April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in a forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers.

Shape without form, shade without color, Paralyzed force, gesture without motion Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom Remember usif at allnot as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.

The definition of hell is a place where nothing connects with nothing.

Quick now, here now, always A condition of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything) And all shall be well All manner of things shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and rose are one.

The nightingales are singing near The Convent of the Sacred Heart, And sang within the bloody wood When Agamemnon cried aloud, And let their liquid siftings fall To stain the stiff dishonored shroud.

One thinks of all the hands That are raising dingy shades In a thousand furnished rooms.

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.

Yeats was the greatest poet of our times ... certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly But merely vans to beat the air The air which is now thoroughly small and dry Smaller and dryer than the will Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair Lean on a garden urn Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

Each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

Reorganized upon the floor She yawns and draws a stocking up.

Immature poets borrow, mature poets steal.

The hippopotamus's day Is passed in sleep at night he hunts God works in a mysterious way The Church can sleep and feed at once.

Here is no water but only rock.

There will be time to murder and create.

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing that is enough for one man's life.

Uncorseted, her friendly bust Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis.

And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you, Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Dayodhuam I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.