T. S. Eliot Quotes
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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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I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular interest. I don't know what it would be like but I think it would be a rather troublesome distraction to have such a lot of dominating presences, as you call them, about. Fortunately we weren't bothered by each other.
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There is no method but to be very intelligent.
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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Business today consists in persuading crowds.
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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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The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.
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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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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 tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.
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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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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.