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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.
T. S. Eliot -
And we all say: OH! Well I never! Was there ever A Cat so clever As Magical Mr. Mistoffelees!
T. S. Eliot
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If you find examples of humanism which are anti-religious, or at least in opposition to the religious faith of the place and time, then such humanism is purely destructive, for it has never found anything to replace what it has destroyed.
T. S. Eliot -
The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely.
T. S. Eliot -
Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius.
T. S. Eliot -
I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare.
T. S. Eliot -
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.
T. S. Eliot -
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.
T. S. Eliot
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It is impossible to say just what I mean!But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:Would it have been worth while If one, settling aPillow or throwing off a shawl,And turning toward the window, should say:'That is not it at all,That is not what I meant, at all.'
T. S. Eliot -
Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.
T. S. Eliot -
Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.
T. S. Eliot -
Sister, mother And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea, Suffer me not to be separated And let my cry come unto Thee.
T. S. Eliot -
Upon the glazen shelves kept watch Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith The army of unalterable law.
T. S. Eliot -
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.
T. S. Eliot
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Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think; whatever you want, be sure that is what you want; whatever you feel, be sure that is what you feel.
T. S. Eliot -
The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions.
T. S. Eliot -
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.
T. S. Eliot -
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.
T. S. Eliot -
A good deal of confusion could be avoided, if we refrained from setting before the group, what can be the aim only of the individual; and before society as a whole, what can be the aim only of the group.
T. S. Eliot -
Any religion is forever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion.
T. S. Eliot
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A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after - and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.
T. S. Eliot -
Fading, fading: strength beyond hope and despair climbing the third stair. Lord, I am not worthy Lord, I am not worthy but speak the word only.
T. S. Eliot -
I journeyed to London, to the timekept City, Where the River flows, with foreign flotations. There I was told: we have too many churches, And too few chop-houses.
T. S. Eliot -
I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls ... Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead.
T. S. Eliot