T. S. Eliot Quotes

456 Sourced Quotes

In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession.

T. S. Eliot
No artist produces great art by a deliberate attempt to express his own personality.

T. S. Eliot
What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.

T. S. Eliot
To approach the stranger is to invite the unexpected, release a new force, let the genie out of the bottle. It is to start a new train of events that is beyond your control...

T. S. Eliot
When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.

T. S. Eliot
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.

T. S. Eliot
Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws?
She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.

T. S. Eliot
The eastern light our spires touch at morning, The light that slants upon our western doors at evening, The twilight over stagnant pools at batflight, Moon light and star light, owl and moth light, Glow-worm glowlight on a grassblade. O Light Invisible, we worship Thee!

T. S. Eliot
The sense of wellbeing! It's often with us When we are young, but then it's not noticed; And by the time one has grown to consciousness It comes less often.

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

T. S. Eliot
A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

T. S. Eliot
The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions.

T. S. Eliot
Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it.

T. S. Eliot
In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light. We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and ecstasy is too much pain.

T. S. Eliot
The Rum Turn Tugger is a terrible bore: When you let him in, then he wants to be out; He's always on the wrong side of every door, And as soon as he's at home, then he'd like to get about.

T. S. Eliot
I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare.

T. S. Eliot
It's harder to confess the sin that no one believes in Than the crime that everyone can appreciate. For the crime is in relation to the law And the sin is in relation to the sinner.

T. S. Eliot
If you find examples of humanism which are anti-religious, or at least in opposition to the religious faith of the place and time, then such humanism is purely destructive, for it has never found anything to replace what it has destroyed.

T. S. Eliot
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is incarnation. Here the impossible union of spheres of existence is actual. Here the past and future are conquered and reconciled.

T. S. Eliot
Religion, as distinguished from modern paganism, implies a life in conformity with nature. It may be observed that the natural life and the supernatural life have a conformity to each other which neither has with the mechanistic life...A wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God...[We should] struggle to recover the sense of relation to nature and to God.

T. S. Eliot
The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in the end it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it. At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means?

T. S. Eliot
History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

T. S. Eliot
It is not enough to understand what we ought to be, unless we know what we are; and we do not understand what we are, unless we know what we ought to be.

T. S. Eliot
A national culture, if it is to flourish, should be a constellation of cultures, the constitutes of which, benefiting each other, benefit the whole.

T. S. Eliot
Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake.

T. S. Eliot
REILLY: Most of my patients begin, Miss Coplestone, by telling me exactly what is the matter with them. And what I am to do about it.

T. S. Eliot
No generation is interested in art in quite the same way as any other; each generation, like each individual, brings to the contemplation of art its own categories of appreciation, makes its own demands upon art, and has its own uses for art.

T. S. Eliot
Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius.

T. S. Eliot
In a mind charged with an eager purpose and an unfinished vindictiveness, there is no room for new feelings.

T. S. Eliot
Maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one's age, and with the same intensity as the emotions of youth.

T. S. Eliot