T. S. Eliot Quotes
-
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
-
Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
-
Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.
-
Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.
-
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.'
-
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
-
To justify Christian morality because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion.
-
Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.
-
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.
-
Today, you're halfway to 100! Here's to optimism, whether it is realistic or not. Happy 50th birthday!
-
So I find words I never thought to speak In streets I never thought I should revisit When I left my body on a distant shore.
-
Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
-
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.
-
If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.
-
We see the light but see not whence it comes. O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!
-
I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;Her coat is one of the tabby kind,with tiger stripes and lepard spots.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
-
All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords.
-
O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.
-
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.
-
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.