T. S. Eliot Quotes
-
Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.
-
Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity, He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.
-
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.
-
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.
-
Business today consists in persuading crowds.
-
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.
-
In my beginning is my end.
-
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.
-
The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.
-
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.
-
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'?
-
These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih
-
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.
-
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.
-
Signs are taken for wonders. 'We would see a sign!'The word within a word, unable to speak a word,Swaddled with darkness.
-
There is no method but to be very intelligent.
-
The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
-
Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.
-
Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.
-
So the lover must struggle for words.
-
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.
-
Sensibility alters from generation to generation in everybody, whether we will or no; but expression is only altered by a man of genius.
-
We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
-
He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare:At whatever time the deed took place-Macavity wasn't there.