T.S. Eliot Quotes: 38

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

  Four Quartets

• Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

• To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.

  The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

• This is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.

• We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.

  Four Quartets

• Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

• Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.

• I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

• We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

  The Cocktail Party

• April is the cruelest month, breedinglilacs out of the dead land, mixingmemory and desire, stirringdull roots with spring rain.

  The Waste Land

• For I have known them all already, known them all—Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

  The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Others

• The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man

• Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

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

• We are the hollow menWe are the stuffed menLeaning togetherHeadpiece filled with straw. Alas!Our dried voices, whenWe whisper togetherAre quiet and meaninglessAs wind in dry grassOr rats' feet over broken glassIn our dry cellarShape without form, shade without colour,Paralysed force, gesture without motion;- The Hollow Men

  Poems: 1909-1925

• If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.

• 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 a toast and tea.

• Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think; whatever you want, be sure that is what you want; whatever you feel, be sure that is what you feel.

• Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

• Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity

• Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.

• Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

  The Sacred Wood

• Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time futureAnd time future contained in time past.

  Four Quartets

• And would it have been worth it, after all,Would it have been worth while,After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor - And this, and so much more? -

  The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems

• LightLightThe visible reminder of Invisible Light.

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

• The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.

• We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.

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

  The Waste Land and Other Poems

• So I find words I never thought to speakIn streets I never thought I should revisitWhen I left my body on a distant shore.

• You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; They called me the hyacinth girl.' —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Od' und leer das Meer.

  The Waste Land and Other Writings

• My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. 'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak. 'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? 'I never know what you are thinking. Think.

  The Waste Land

• Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?Where is the knowledge we have lost in infomation?

• Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

  The Sacred Wood

• 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.

  The Sacred Wood

• Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.

  Selected Essays

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

  The Waste Land

• Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.