T. S. Eliot Quotes
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This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
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So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.
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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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They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. But the man that is shall shadow The man that pretends to be.
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To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.
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The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
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And I have known the arms already, known them all - Arms that are braceleted and white and bare But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!It is perfume from a dress That makes me so digress?Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. And should I then presume?
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When comparing works of art, it is important that the art itself, and not the artists, be considered.
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Mistah Kurtz - he dead
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I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.
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I was neitherLiving nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
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It's harder to confess the sin that no one believes in Than the crime that everyone can appreciate. For the crime is in relation to the law And the sin is in relation to the sinner.
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No generation is interested in art in quite the same way as any other; each generation, like each individual, brings to the contemplation of art its own categories of appreciation, makes its own demands upon art, and has its own uses for art.
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Light Light The visible reminder of Invisible Light.
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Our age is an age of moderate virtue And moderate vice
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Not less of love, but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the Future as well as the past.
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That was my way of putting it-not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings.
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Where the bricks are fallen We will build with new stone Where the beams are rotten We will build with new timbers Where the word is unspoken We will build with new speech There is work together A Church for all And a job for each Every man to his work.
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In this decayed hole among the mountainsIn the faint moonlight, the grass is singingOver the tumbled graves, about the chapelThere is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.
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It is impossible to say just what I mean!But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:Would it have been worth while If one, settling aPillow or throwing off a shawl,And turning toward the window, should say:'That is not it at all,That is not what I meant, at all.'
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To men of a certain type The suspicion that they are incapable of loving Is as disturbing to their self-esteem As, in cruder men, the fear of impotence.
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Think not forever of yourselves, O Chiefs, nor of your own generation. Think of continuing generations of our families, think of our grandchildren and of those yet unborn, whose faces are coming from beneath the ground.
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Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
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Before a cat will condescend to treat you as a trusted friend, some little token of esteem is needed, like a dish of cream.