T. S. Eliot Quotes

456 Sourced Quotes

Two people who know they do not understand each other,
Breeding children whom they do not understand
And who will never understand them.

T. S. Eliot
The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood –
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

T. S. Eliot
What happens when a new work of art is created, is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.

T. S. Eliot
Only undefeated Because we have gone on trying; We, content at the last If our temporal reversion nourish (Not too far from the yew tree) The life of significant soil.

T. S. Eliot
Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house —
The wall, the wainscot and the mouse The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.

T. S. Eliot
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"?

T. S. Eliot
You don't want to say the same thing twice in one book.

T. S. Eliot
As a rule, with me an unfinished thing is a thing that might as well be rubbed out.

T. S. Eliot
I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.

T. S. Eliot
Between the idea And the reality Between the notion And the act Falls the shadow.

T. S. Eliot
I suspect that in our loathing of totalitarianism, there is infused a good deal of admiration for its efficiency.

T. S. Eliot
People are only influenced in the direction in which they want to go, and influence consists largely in making them conscious of their wishes to proceed in that direction.

T. S. Eliot
You must not on any account give me credit for being penetrating. I have impressed people that way before, and the result is always disaster.

T. S. Eliot
All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment.

T. S. Eliot
If one has to earn a living, therefore, the safest occupation is that most remote from the arts.

T. S. Eliot
But what have I, but what have I, my friend,
To give you, what can you receive from me?
Only the friendship and the sympathy
Of one about to reach her journey's end.

T. S. Eliot
If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.

T. S. Eliot
The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without.

T. S. Eliot
Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.

T. S. Eliot
Envy is everywhere. Who is without envy? And most people Are unaware or unashamed of being envious.

T. S. Eliot
I journeyed to London, to the timekept City, Where the River flows, with foreign flotations. There I was told: we have too many churches, And too few chop-houses.

T. S. Eliot
Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation.

T. S. Eliot
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.

T. S. Eliot
She thinks that the cockroaches just need employment To prevent them from idle and wanton destroyment. So she's formed from that lot of disorderly louts, A troop of well-disciplined helpful boy scouts, With a purpose in life and a good to do — And she's even created a Beetle Tattoo.

T. S. Eliot
In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur and faeces, Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

T. S. Eliot
The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.

T. S. Eliot
There is no such thing as a lost cause, because there is no such thing as a gained cause

T. S. Eliot
The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible.

T. S. Eliot
The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.

T. S. Eliot
Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.

T. S. Eliot