T. S. Eliot Quotes
-
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
-
The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
-
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
-
so the countess passed on until she came through the little park, where Niobe presented her with a cabinet, and so departed.
-
It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.
-
Home is where one starts from.
-
When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.
-
Webster was much possessed by deathAnd saw the skull beneath the skin
-
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?
-
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.
-
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
-
April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.
-
Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it.
-
I say to you: Make perfect your will. / I say: take no thought of the harvest, / But only of proper sowing.
-
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.
-
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
-
Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity, He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.
-
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.
-
In my beginning is my end.
-
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only The wind will listen.
-
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.
-
I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.
-
We ask only to be reassured About the noises in the cellar And the window that should not have been open
-
Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult...The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning.