T. S. Eliot Quotes
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The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter, It isn't just one of your holiday games; You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
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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.
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Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall My buried life, and Paris in the spring, I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world To be wonderful and youthful afterall
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In the room the women come and goTalking of Michelangelo.
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It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the 'dear deceit' of beauty.
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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.
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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.
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But at my back from time to time I hear The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water.
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They don't understand what it is to be awake, / To be living on several planes at once / Though one cannot speak with several voices at once.
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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.'
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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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At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives.
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Before a cat will condescend to treat you as a trusted friend, some little token of esteem is needed, like a dish of cream.
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A philosophy can and must be worked out with the greatest rigour and discipline in the details, but can ultimately be founded on nothing but faith: and this is the reason, I suspect, why the novelties in philosophy are only in elaboration, and never in fundamentals.
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A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.
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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.
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Cats must have three names-an everyday name, such as Peter; a more particular, dignified name, such as Quaxo, Bombalurina, or Jellylorum; and, thirdly, the name the cat thinks up for himself, his deep and inscrutable singular Name.
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With a poem you can say 'I got my feeling into words for myself. I now have the equivalent in words for that much of what I have felt.'
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After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions Guides us by vanities.
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I do not approve the extermination of the enemy; the policy of exterminating or, as it is barbarously said, liquidating enemies, is one of the most alarming developments of modern war and peace, from the point of view of those who desire the survival
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The dripping blood our only drink, The bloody flesh our only food: In spite of which we like to think That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
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Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self.
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All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment.
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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.