T. S. Eliot Quotes

456 Sourced Quotes

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

T. S. Eliot
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

T. S. Eliot
Some one said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know.

T. S. Eliot
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.

T. S. Eliot
What have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards in an age which advances progressively backwards?

T. S. Eliot
Our age is an age of moderate virtue
And moderate vice

T. S. Eliot
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

T. S. Eliot
Before a Cat will condescend
To treat you as a trusted friend,
Some little token of esteem
Is needed, like a dish of cream.

T. S. Eliot
There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger.

T. S. Eliot
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

T. S. Eliot
To rest in your own suffering
Is evasion of suffering. We must learn to suffer more.

T. S. Eliot
If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.

T. S. Eliot
O hidden under the dove's wing, hidden in the turtle's breast, Under the palmtree at noon, under the running water At the still point of the turning world. O hidden.

T. S. Eliot
The moment of sudden loathing
And the season of stifled sorrow
The whisper, the transparent deception
The keeping up of appearances
The making the best of a bad job
All twined and tangled together, all are recorded.

T. S. Eliot
Sometimes, however, to be a "ruined man" is itself a vocation.

T. S. Eliot
Atheism should always be encouraged (i. e. rationalistic not emotional atheism) for the sake of the Faith.

T. S. Eliot
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

T. S. Eliot
Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness...

T. S. Eliot
To country people Cows are mild, And flee from any stick they throw; But I'm a timid town bred child, And all the cattle seem to know.

T. S. Eliot
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by the way which is the way of ignorance.

T. S. Eliot
Grishkin is nice: her
Russian eye is underlined for emphasis;
Uncorseted, her friendly bust
Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.

T. S. Eliot
Pain is the opposite of joy,
but joy is a kind of pain
I believe the moment of birth
Is when we have knowledge of death
I believe the season of birth
Is the season of sacrifice

T. S. Eliot
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