T. S. Eliot Quotes
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Ash on an old man's sleeve / Is all the ash the burnt roses leave, / Dust in the air suspended / Marks the place where a story ended.
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So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
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The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
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Home is where one starts from.
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so the countess passed on until she came through the little park, where Niobe presented her with a cabinet, and so departed.
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It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.
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April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.
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When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.
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To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
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I shall not want Honor in Heaven For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney And have talk with Coriolanus And other heroes of that kidney.
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I say to you: Make perfect your will. / I say: take no thought of the harvest, / But only of proper sowing.
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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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What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.
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Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
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No scheme for a change of society can be made to appear immediately palatable, except by falsehood, until society has become so desperate that it will accept any change.
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Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it.
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The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in the end it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it. At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means?
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Redeem The time. Redeem The unread vision in the higher dream While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.
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We can at least try to understand our own motives, passions, and prejudices, so as to be conscious of what we are doing when we apeal to those of others. This is very difficult, because our own prejudice and emotional bias always seems to us so rational.
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Turning Wearily, as one would turn to nod goodbye to Rochefoucauld, If the street were time and he as the end of the street.
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O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
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In my beginning is my end.
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Atheism should always be encouraged (i.e. rationalistic not emotional atheism) for the sake of the Faith.
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Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.