T. S. Eliot - Four Quartets (1943)

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We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

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

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

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

T. S. Eliot
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

T. S. Eliot
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

T. S. Eliot
The houses are all gone under the sea.
The dancers are all gone under the hill.

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
And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion.

T. S. Eliot
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

T. S. Eliot
Garlic and sapphires in the mud Clot the bedded axle-tree. The trilling wire in the blood Sings below inveterate scars And reconciles forgotten wars.

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

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

T. S. Eliot
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.

T. S. Eliot
When the short day is brightest, with forest and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's beat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.

T. S. Eliot
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of children in the foliage Quick now, here, now, always — Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after.

T. S. Eliot
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

T. S. Eliot
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral, Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury. I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God.

T. S. Eliot
The backward look behind the assurance Of recorded history, the backward half-look Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.

T. S. Eliot
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.

T. S. Eliot
Only undefeated Because we have gone on trying; We, content at the last If our temporal reversion nourish (Not too far from the yew tree) The life of significant soil.

T. S. Eliot
Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house —
The wall, the wainscot and the mouse The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.

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

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

T. S. Eliot
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is incarnation. Here the impossible union of spheres of existence is actual. Here the past and future are conquered and reconciled.

T. S. Eliot
We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.

T. S. Eliot
In the uncertain hour before the morning Near the ending of interminable night At the recurrent end of the unending After the dark dove with the flickering tongue Had passed below the horizon of his homing.

T. S. Eliot