T. S. Eliot Quotes

456 Sourced Quotes

Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jeweled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

T. S. Eliot
That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings.

T. S. Eliot
The whole earth is our hospital Endowed by the ruined millionaire.

T. S. Eliot
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze The troubled midnight and the noon's repose.

T. S. Eliot
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

T. S. Eliot
Jellicle Cats come out tonight,
Jellicle Cats come one come all:
The Jellicle Moon is shining bright —
Jellicles come to the Jellicle Ball.

T. S. Eliot
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

T. S. Eliot
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.

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

T. S. Eliot
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.

T. S. Eliot
It's all a delusion,
Everything you feel — I don't mean what you think,
But what you feel. You attach yourself to loathing
As others do to loving; an infatuation
That's wrong, a good that is misdirected.

T. S. Eliot
When the short day is brightest, with forest and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's beat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.

T. S. Eliot
In the vacant places
We will build with new bricks

T. S. Eliot
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of children in the foliage Quick now, here, now, always — Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after.

T. S. Eliot
There are several symptoms
Which must occur together, and to a marked degree,
To qualify a patient for my sanatorium:
And one of them is an honest mind. That is one of the causes of their suffering.

T. S. Eliot
You will change your mind, but you are not free.
Your moment of freedom was yesterday.
You made a decision. You set in motion
Forces in your life and in the lives of others
Which cannot be reversed.

T. S. Eliot
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.

T. S. Eliot
I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

T. S. Eliot
We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

T. S. Eliot
You're still trying to invent a personality for me
Which will only keep me away from myself.

T. S. Eliot
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while If one, settling a
Pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."

T. S. Eliot
I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

T. S. Eliot
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

T. S. Eliot
In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away.

T. S. Eliot
And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.

T. S. Eliot
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral, Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury. I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God.

T. S. Eliot
The backward look behind the assurance Of recorded history, the backward half-look Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.

T. S. Eliot
Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall My buried life, and Paris in the spring, I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world To be wonderful and youthful after all.

T. S. Eliot
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.

T. S. Eliot
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown, Lilac and brown hair; Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind over the third stair, Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair Climbing the third stair.

T. S. Eliot