T. S. Eliot Quotes
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No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job....Poetry..remains one person talking to another....no poet can write a poem of amplitude unless he is the master of the prosaic.
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Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.
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You are the music while the music lasts.
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Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
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The soul of Man must quicken to creation.
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Wavering between the profit and the loss In this brief transit where the dreams cross The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
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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.
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This love is silent.
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O Light Invisible, we praise Thee! Too bright for mortal vision.
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It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London.
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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.
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Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger. Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.
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What is that sound high in the air Murmur of maternal lamentation Who are those hooded hordes swarming Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth Ringed by the flat horizon only What is the city over the mountains Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air Falling towers Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London Unreal
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I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.
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Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.
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When the whole world is running headlong towards the precipice, one who walks in the opposite direction is looked at as being crazy.
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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?
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No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;Am an attendant lord, one that will doTo swell a progress, start a scene or two,Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,Deferential, glad to be of use,Politic, cautious, and meticulous;Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;At times, indeed, almost ridiculous - Almost, at times, the Fool.
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I learn a great deal by merely observing you, and letting you talk as long as you please, and taking note of what you do not say.
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It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.
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The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
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Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only The wind will listen.
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So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
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It is not the 'greatness,' the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.