T. S. Eliot Quotes
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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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Those who have crossedWith direct eyes, to death's other KingdomRemember us - if at all - not as lostViolent souls, but onlyAs the hollow menThe stuffed men.
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O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.
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Old Deuteronomy's lived a long time; He's a Cat who has lived many lives in succession. He was famous in proverb and famous in rhyme A long while before Queen Victoria's accession.
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The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
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Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.
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My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.
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We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value - a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity.
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The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
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History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
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If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby 'it.'
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The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
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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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Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?
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There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not. You shall not deny the Stranger.
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Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
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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 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.
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I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable.
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A woman drew her long black hair out tight, And fiddled whisper music on those strings, And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings, And crawled head downward down a blackened wall.
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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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There came one who spoke of the shame of Jerusalem And the holy places defiled; Peter the Hermit, scourging with words. And among his hearers were a few good men, Many who were evil, And most who were neither, Like all men in all places.
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Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
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Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.