T. S. Eliot Quotes

456 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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
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