T. S. Eliot Quotes

456 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
One thing you cannot know:
The sudden extinction of every alternative,
The unexpected crash of the iron cataract.
You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it.
You only know what it is not to hope:
You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you,
Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless
Unrecognized by other men, though sometimes by each other.

T. S. Eliot
We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.

T. S. Eliot
Success is relative:
It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.

T. S. Eliot
We see the light but see not whence it comes.
O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!

T. S. Eliot
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

T. S. Eliot
Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.

T. S. Eliot
I have had quite enough humiliation
Lately, to bring me to the point
At which humiliation ceases to humiliate.
You get to the point at which you cease to feel
And then you speak your mind.

T. S. Eliot
There are three conditions which often look alike Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference,....

T. S. Eliot
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen.

T. S. Eliot
The number of people with any criteria for distinguishing between good and evil is very small.

T. S. Eliot
Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.
He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare:
At whatever time the deed took place—macavity wasn't there!

T. S. Eliot
There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.

T. S. Eliot
Everyone's alone — or so it seems to me.
They make noises, and think they are talking to each other;
They make faces, and think they understand each other.
And I'm sure they don't. Is that a delusion?

T. S. Eliot
Signs are taken for wonders. We would see a sign!
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness.

T. S. Eliot