T. S. Eliot Quotes

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.

They don't understand what it is to be awake, / To be living on several planes at once / Though one cannot speak with several voices at once.

I can connect Nothing with nothing

The purpose of a Christian education would not be merely to make men and women pious Christians: a system which aimed too rigidly at this end alone would become only obscurantist. A Christian education must primarily teach people to be able to think in Christian categories.

Anecdote: It is by no means self-evident that human beings are most real when most violently excited; violent physical passions do not in themselves differentiate men from each other, but rather tend to reduce them to the same state.

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.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions Guides us by vanities.

life is long between the desire and the spasm.

Any religion is forever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion.

I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones.

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues.

Before a cat will condescend to treat you as a trusted friend, some little token of esteem is needed, like a dish of cream.

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.

And all shall be well and/ All manner of thing shall be well/ By the purification of the motive/ In the ground of our beseeching

Artistic inevitability lies in the complete adequacy of the external to the emotion.

Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.

It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored in climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both.

In the life of one man, never The same time returns.

What is true, is true only for one time and only for one place.

All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment.

Shape without form, shade without color, Paralyzed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom Remember us-if at all-not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.

And indeed there will be time for the yellow smoke that slides along the street rubbing its back upon the window-panes; there will be time , there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; there will be time to murder and create, and time for all the works and days of hands that lift and drop a question on your plate; time for you and time for me, and time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of toast and tea.

Not less of love, but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the Future as well as the past.

Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.

I shall not want Honor in Heaven For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney And have talk with Coriolanus And other heroes of that kidney.

What we know of other people's only our memory of the moments during which we knew them.

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.'

Men dislike being awakened from their death in life.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

Finding a way to live the simple life is one of life's supreme complications.

It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.

Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.

Every moment is a fresh beginning.

Art is the escape from personality.

We ask only to be reassured About the noises in the cellar And the window that should not have been open

You have learned enough to see that cats are much like you and me.

Only through time time is conquered

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Men live by forgetting and woman live on memories.

A wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude toward God.

This is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word.

The greatest proof of Christianity for others is not how far a man can logically analyze his reasons for believing, but how far in practice he will stake his life on his belief.

My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Time past and time future allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time.

At the beach - time you enjoyed wasting, is not wasted.

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.

Signs are taken for wonders. / 'We would see a sign!' / The word within a word, unable to speak a word, / Swaddled with darkness.