T. S. Eliot Quotes

It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London.

Home is where one starts from.

Think neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence

The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to God. 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? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice.

If you do not push the boundaries, you will never know where they are.

A wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and that the consequence is an inevitable doom. For a long enough time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet.

Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self.

The naming of cats is a difficult matter

The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

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.

Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.

When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smooths her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone.

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.

It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

Birth, and copulation, and death; that's all the facts when you come to brass tacks.

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

There will be time to murder and create.

Uncorseted, her friendly bust Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.

In my beginning is my end.

His laughter tinkled among the teacups.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

A tradition without intelligence is not worth having.

Redeem the time. Redeem the unread vision of a higher dream.

So the lover must struggle for words.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not all it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

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

The True Church can never fail. For it is based upon a rock.

There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience.

A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.

There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.

The name that no human research can discover-- But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess. When you notice a cat in profound meditation, The reason, I tell you, is always the same: His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name: His ineffable effable Effanineffable Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake.

Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow

Unreal friendship may turn to real But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended

In the end is my beginning.

What have we given? My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment's surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, I am no prophet--and here's no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid.

Accident is design / And design is accident / In a cloud of unknowing.

My mind may be American but my heart is British.

In the last few years everything I'd done up to sixty or so has seemed very childish.

I love reading another reader’s list of favorites. Even when I find I do not share their tastes or predilections, I am provoked to compare, contrast, and contradict. It is a most healthy exercise, and one altogether fruitful.

Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.

April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.