T. S. Eliot Quotes
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As a rule, with me an unfinished [idea] is a thing that might as well be rubbed out. It's better, if there's something good in it that I might make use of elsewhere, to leave it at the back of my mind than on paper in a drawer. If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing but if it's in the memory it becomes transformed into something else.
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This is the land which ye Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.
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But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.
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It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.
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Dear Mother, I am getting on nicely in my work at the bank, and like it ... I want to find out something about the science of money while I am at it; it is an extraordinarily interesting subject.
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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.
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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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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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In the vacant places We will build with new bricks
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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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When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom, the work is likely to sprawl.
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What life have you, if you have not life together? There is not life that is not in community, And no community not lived in praise of GOD.
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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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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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And all shall be well and/ All manner of thing shall be well/ By the purification of the motive/ In the ground of our beseeching
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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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To country people Cows are mild, And flee from any stick they throw; But I’m a timid town bred child, And all the cattle seem to know.
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The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is incarnation. Here the impossible union of spheres of existence is actual. Here the past and future are conquered and reconciled.
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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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The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible.
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It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is a life.
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Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation.
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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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There are flood and drought over the eyes and in the mouth, dead water and dead sand contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil gapes at the vanity of toil, laughs without mirth. This is the death of the earth.