T. S. Eliot Quotes
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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 time and space, as sages say, Are things which cannot be, The sun which does not feel decay No greater is than we. So why, Love, should we ever pray To live a century? The butterfly that lives a day Has lived eternity.
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Grishkin is nice: herRussian eye is underlined for emphasis;Uncorseted, her friendly bustGives promise of pneumatic bliss.
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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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Between the ideaAnd the realityBetween the motionAnd the actFalls the Shadow
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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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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 most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.
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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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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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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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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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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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Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.
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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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Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.
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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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Today, you're halfway to 100! Here's to optimism, whether it is realistic or not. Happy 50th birthday!
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The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
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Business today consists in persuading crowds.
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We have all our private terrors, our particular shadows, our secret fears. We are afraid in a fear which we cannot face, which none understands, and our hearts are torn from us, our brains unskinned like the layers of an onion, ourselves the last.
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Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?