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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The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
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Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.
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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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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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A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.
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Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.
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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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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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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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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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We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
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Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?
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And I have known the eyes already, known them all - The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,Then how should I beginTo spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
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Would it have been worth while, To have bitten off the matter with a smile, To have squeezed the universe into a ball To roll it towards some overwhelming question
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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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Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,An old man in a draughty houseUnder a windy knob.
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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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So the lover must struggle for words.
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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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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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Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.
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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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Because I do not hope to turn again Because I do not hope Because I do not hope to turn Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope I no longer strive to strive towards such things (Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?) Why should I mourn The vanished power of the usual reign?