T. S. Eliot Quotes

So first, your memory I'll jog, And say: A CAT IS NOT A DOG

Talent imitates, but genius steals.

In spite of all the dishonour, the broken standards, the broken lives, The broken faith in one place or another, There was something left that was more than the tales Of old men on winter evenings.

Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.

There are flood and drought over the eyes and in the mouth, dead water and dead sand contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil gapes at the vanity of toil, laughs without mirth. This is the death of the earth.

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius.

The great ages did not contain the best talent, they wasted less.

The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.

Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other Who think the same thoughts without need of speech

Every moment is a new and shocking transvaluation of all we have ever been.

Sensibility alters from generation to generation in everybody, whether we will or no; but expression is only altered by a man of genius.

Light Light The visible reminder of Invisible Light.

We must always take risks. That is our destiny.

And indeed there will be time to wonder, 'Do I dare?', and 'Do I dare?

The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

We must learn to suffer more.

Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative.

The young feel tired at the end of an action, the old at the beginning.

Bad poets imitate, good poets steal.

Good poets borrow, great poets steal

The old should be explorers, be curious, risk transgression, explore oldness itself.

Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it

Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.

I am no prophet-and here's no great matter.

It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.

I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids Sprouting despondently at area gates.

Between the vision and the act lies the shadow.

Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance

Shall I part my hair behind Do I dare to eat a peach I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it

A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

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.

The destination cannot be described; / You will know very little until you get there; / You will journey blind.

The past and future / Are conquered, and reconciled.

Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

As we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated of dead and living.

That is the worst moment, when you feel you have lost / The desires for all that was most desirable, / Before you are contented with what you can desire; / Before you know what is left to be desired; / And you go on wishing that you could desire / What desire has left behind.

A good deal of confusion could be avoided, if we refrained from setting before the group, what can be the aim only of the individual; and before society as a whole, what can be the aim only of the group.

Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.

There are three conditions which often look alike Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference, ... .

Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.

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.

If you find examples of humanism which are anti-religious, or at least in opposition to the religious faith of the place and time, then such humanism is purely destructive, for it has never found anything to replace what it has destroyed.

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.

He laughed like an irresponsible foetus.

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?