T. S. Eliot Quotes
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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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We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now, by suffering. This is the easier victory.
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Nothing pleases people more than to go on thinking what they have always thought, and at the same time imagine that they are thinking something new and daring: it combines the advantage of
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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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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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Between the ideaAnd the realityBetween the motionAnd the actFalls the Shadow
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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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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.
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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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Because I cannot hope to turn again Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something Upon which to rejoice
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Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.
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Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.
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Then spoke the thunder DA Datta: what have we given? My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment's surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed.
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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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The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.
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Business today consists in persuading crowds.
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And would it have been worth it, after all, Would it have been worth while, After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor - And this, and so much more? -
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Who is the third who walks always beside you When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you
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It is not enough to understand what we ought to be, unless we know what we are; and we do not understand what we are, unless we know what we ought to be.
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The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a sceptic or an unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination to think anything out to a conclusion.
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An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.
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The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
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Today, you're halfway to 100! Here's to optimism, whether it is realistic or not. Happy 50th birthday!