T. S. Eliot Quotes
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It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.
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Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
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Sensibility alters from generation to generation in everybody, whether we will or no; but expression is only altered by a man of genius.
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Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.
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I shall not want Honor in Heaven For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney And have talk with Coriolanus And other heroes of that kidney.
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People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.
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The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in the end it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it. At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means?
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Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.
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It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape, not from our own time - for we are bound by that - but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.
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There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.
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Atheism should always be encouraged (i.e. rationalistic not emotional atheism) for the sake of the Faith.
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Turning Wearily, as one would turn to nod goodbye to Rochefoucauld, If the street were time and he as the end of the street.
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There is no method but to be very intelligent.
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We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
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A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.
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The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.
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If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
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Between the ideaAnd the realityBetween the motionAnd the actFalls the Shadow
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He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare:At whatever time the deed took place-Macavity wasn't there.
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Redeem The time. Redeem The unread vision in the higher dream While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.
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Each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.
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Mr. Aldous Huxley, who is perhaps one of those people who have to perpetrate thirty bad novels before producing a good one, has a certain natural - but little developed - aptitude for seriousness.
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There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.
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The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.