T. S. Eliot Quotes

You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends, And how, how rare and strange it is, to find In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends, (For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? you are not blind! How keen you are!) To find a friend who has these qualities, Who has, and gives Those qualities upon which friendship lives. How much it means that I say this to you- Without these friendships-life, what cauchemar!

There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.

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.

For every life and every act consequence of good and evil can be shown and as in time results of many deeds are blended so good and evil in the end become confounded.

The role of art is not to express the personality but to overcome it.

Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not.

Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman -But who is that on the other side of you?

With a poem you can say 'I got my feeling into words for myself. I now have the equivalent in words for that much of what I have felt.'

It has frequently been said that we never desire what we think absolutely inapprehensible: it is however true that some of our sharpest agonies are those in which the object of desire is regarded as both possible and imaginary.

The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself.

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.

It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape, not from our own time - for we are bound by that - but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.

Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.

Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.

Death has a hundred hands and walks by a thousand ways.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.

Our emotions Are only “incidents” In the effort to keep day and night together.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

When the Stranger says: "What is the meaning of this city? Do you huddle close together because you love each other?" What will you answer? "We all dwell together To make money from each other"? or "This is a community"? Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger. Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

I confess . . . that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very vast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

We fight to keep something alive rather than in the expectation that anything will triumph.

The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

Our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and of our visible, sensible world.

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.

The usual dog about the town is much inclined to play the clown.

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste and end by debauching it.

Success is relative. It is what we make of the mess we have made of things.

To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now.

It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.

and now you live dispersed on ribbon roads, And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance, But all dash to and fro in motor cars, Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.

No scheme for a change of society can be made to appear immediately palatable, except by falsehood, until society has become so desperate that it will accept any change.

I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.

Justice itself tends to be corrupted by political passion.

When war is not just it is subsequently justified; so it becomes many things. In reality, an unjust war is merely piracy. It consists of piracy, ego and, more than anything, money. War is our century's prostitution.

We can at least try to understand our own motives, passions, and prejudices, so as to be conscious of what we are doing when we apeal to those of others. This is very difficult, because our own prejudice and emotional bias always seems to us so rational.

The darkness declares the glory of light.

We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors' victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.

A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.

There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.

I've been born, and once is enough.

Hurry up, please, its time.

It takes so many years to learn that one is dead.