T. S. Eliot Quotes
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I am no prophet - and here's no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,And in short, I was afraid.
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To approach the stranger is to invite the unexpected, release a new force, let the genie out of the bottle. It is to start a new train of events that is beyond your control.
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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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Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
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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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It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous. Resign yourself to be the fool you are... ...We must always take risks. That is our destiny.
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We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors' victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.
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There is no method but to be very intelligent.
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Business today consists in persuading crowds.
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Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity, He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.
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Signs are taken for wonders. 'We would see a sign!'The word within a word, unable to speak a word,Swaddled with darkness.
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The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.
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These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih
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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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Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult...The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning.
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Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.
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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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Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.
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So the lover must struggle for words.
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Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.
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The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
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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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When the Stranger says: 'What is the meaning of this city ? Do you huddle close together because you love each other?' What will you answer? 'We all dwell together To make money from each other'? or 'This is a community'?