T. S. Eliot Quotes

456 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

T. S. Eliot
Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jeweled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

T. S. Eliot
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze The troubled midnight and the noon's repose.

T. S. Eliot
The whole earth is our hospital Endowed by the ruined millionaire.

T. S. Eliot
That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings.

T. S. Eliot
Speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight.

T. S. Eliot
To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.

T. S. Eliot
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

T. S. Eliot
It seems just possible that a poem might happen
To a very young man: but a poem is not poetry –
That is a life.

T. S. Eliot