T. S. Eliot Quotes

456 Sourced Quotes

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care

T. S. Eliot
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

T. S. Eliot
It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

T. S. Eliot
What is hell? Hell is oneself.
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

T. S. Eliot
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled About the center of the silent Word.

T. S. Eliot
At the still point of the turning world.
Neither flesh nor fleshless.

T. S. Eliot
But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.
Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has never happened before
That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason,
And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic.

T. S. Eliot
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe.

T. S. Eliot
Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living.

T. S. Eliot
All that I can hope to make you understand
Is only events: not what has happened.
And people to whom nothing has ever happened
Cannot understand the unimportance of events.

T. S. Eliot
And I must borrow every changing shape
To find expression.

T. S. Eliot
It is certain that a book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.

T. S. Eliot
I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.

T. S. Eliot
We did not wish anything to happen.
We understood the private catastrophe,
The personal loss, the general misery,
Living and partly living;

T. S. Eliot
The lot of man is ceaseless labor,
Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder,
Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant.
I have trodden the winepress alone, and I know
That it is hard to be really useful, resigning
The things that men count for happiness, seeking
The good deeds that lead to obscurity, accepting
With equal face those that bring ignominy,
The applause of all or the love of none.
All men are ready to invest their money
But most expect dividends.
I say to you: Make perfect your will.
I say: take no thought of the harvest,
But only of proper sowing.

T. S. Eliot
Your burden is not to clear your conscience
But to learn how to bear the burdens on your conscience.

T. S. Eliot
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

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
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
Clear the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! take the stone from stone, take the skin from the arm, take the muscle from bone, and wash them.

T. S. Eliot
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble.

T. S. Eliot
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face

T. S. Eliot
There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing, No end to the withering of withered flowers.

T. S. Eliot
I love you to the limits of speech, and beyond.
It's strange that words are so inadequate.
Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath,
So the lover must struggle for words.

T. S. Eliot
To me…[The Waste Land] was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.

T. S. Eliot
O father, father
Gone from us, lost to us,
The church lies bereft,
Alone,
Desecrated, desolated.
And the heathen shall build
On the ruins
Their world without God.
I see it.
I see it.

T. S. Eliot
Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity, He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity. His powers of levitation would make a fakir stare, And when you reach the scene of the crime — Macavity's not there!

T. S. Eliot
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

T. S. Eliot
A good deal of confusion could be avoided, if we refrained from setting before the group, what can be the aim only of the individual; and before society as a whole, what can be the aim only of the group.

T. S. Eliot
Men learn little from others' experience.
But in the life of one man, never
The same time returns. Sever
The cord, shed the scale. Only
The fool, fixed in his folly, may think
He can turn the wheel on which he turns

T. S. Eliot