T. S. Eliot Quotes
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Let me show you the work of the humble. Listen.
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Unreal city, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.
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The greatest proof of Christianity for others is not how far a man can logically analyze his reasons for believing, but how far in practice he will stake his life on his belief.
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The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.
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Yes the Rum Tum Tugger is a Curious Cat - And there isn't any call for me to shout it: For he will do As he do do And there's no doing anything about it!
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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.
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Hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.
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Jellicle Cats come out tonight, Jellicle Cats come one come all: The Jellicle Moon is shining bright - Jellicles come to the Jellicle Ball.
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Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative.
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The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.
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Art serves us best precisely at that point where it can shift our sense of what is possible, when we know more than we knew before, when we feel we have - by some manner of a leap - encountered the truth. That, by the logic of art, is always worth the pain.
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You now have learned enough to see That Cats are much like you and me And other people whom we find Possessed of various types of mind. For some are sane and some are mad And some are good and some are bad And some are better, some are worse - But all may be described in verse.
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The endless cycle of idea and action, / Endless invention, endless experiment, / Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; / Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; / Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.
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A penny for the Old Guy
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Anecdote: It is by no means self-evident that human beings are most real when most violently excited; violent physical passions do not in themselves differentiate men from each other, but rather tend to reduce them to the same state.
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If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.
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No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism.
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I am moved by fancies that are curledAround these images, and cling:The notion of some infinitely gentleInfinitely suffering thing.
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Think 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.
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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. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
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The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.
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Eyes I dare not meet in dreamsIn death's dream kingdom´These do not appear:There, the eyes areSunlight on a broken columnThere, is a tree swingingAnd voices areIn the wind's singingMore distant and more solemnThan a fading star.
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The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity, sluggish and indomitable as a glacier, will mitigate the most violent, and depress the most exalted revolution.
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It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored in climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both.