T. S. Eliot Quotes

456 Sourced Quotes

They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be.

T. S. Eliot
To then young Stephen Spender who had revealed that he wanted to be a poet:
I can understand your wanting to write poems, but I don't quite know what you mean by 'being a poet'.

T. S. Eliot
The critic must compose his differences with as many of his fellows as possible in the common pursuit of true judgement.

T. S. Eliot
The general point of view may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.

T. S. Eliot
What is this self-inside us, this silent observer, severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us, and urge us onto futile activity, and in the end, judge us still more severely for the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?

T. S. Eliot
So the countess passed on until she came through the little park, where Niobe presented her with a cabinet, and so departed.

T. S. Eliot
The broad-backed hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.

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

T. S. Eliot
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

T. S. Eliot
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous —
Almost, at times, the Fool.

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

T. S. Eliot
Stand on the highest pavement of the stair — Lean on a garden urn— Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

T. S. Eliot
There came one who spoke of the shame of Jerusalem
And the holy places defiled;
Peter the Hermit, scourging with words.
And among his hearers were a few good men,
Many who were evil,
And most who were neither,
Like all men in all places.

T. S. Eliot
This is what matters, but it is unspeakable.
Untranslatable: I talk in general terms
Because the particular has no language.

T. S. Eliot
Now that lilacs are in bloom She has a bowl of lilacs in her room And twists one in her fingers while she talks. "Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know What life is, you who hold it in your hands"; (slowly twisting the lilac stalks) "You let it flow from you, you let it flow, And youth is cruel, and has no remorse And smiles at situations which it cannot see." I smile, of course, And go on drinking tea.

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

T. S. Eliot
A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after - and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.

T. S. Eliot
There are flood and drouth
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.

T. S. Eliot
The one thing to do is to do nothing. Wait. … You will find that you survive humiliation and that's an experience of incalculable value.

T. S. Eliot
It is not the "greatness," the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.

T. S. Eliot
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

T. S. Eliot
The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a sceptic or an unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination to think anything out to a conclusion.

T. S. Eliot
The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change,
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

T. S. Eliot
Genuine blasphemy, genuine in spirit and not purely verbal, is the product of partial belief, and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect Christian.

T. S. Eliot
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"

T. S. Eliot
The hippopotamus's day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way—
The Church can sleep and feed at once.

T. S. Eliot
Old Deuteronomy's lived a long time;
He's a Cat who has lived many lives in succession.
He was famous in proverb and famous in rhyme
A long while before Queen Victoria's accession.

T. S. Eliot
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated And let my cry come unto Thee.

T. S. Eliot
I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.

T. S. Eliot
God is leaving us, God is leaving us, more pang, more
pain, than birth or death.

T. S. Eliot