T. S. Eliot - Four Quartets (1943)

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Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

T. S. Eliot
Music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

T. S. Eliot
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

T. S. Eliot
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire Consumed by either fire or fire.

T. S. Eliot
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.

T. S. Eliot
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

T. S. Eliot
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

T. S. Eliot
What is the late November doing With the disturbance of the spring.

T. S. Eliot
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

T. S. Eliot
A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

T. S. Eliot
To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now.

T. S. Eliot
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

T. S. Eliot
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.

T. S. Eliot
So I find words I never thought to speak In streets I never thought I should revisit When I left my body on a distant shore.

T. S. Eliot
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

T. S. Eliot
Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the
dance.

T. S. Eliot
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre -
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

T. S. Eliot
There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience.

T. S. Eliot
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.

T. S. Eliot
Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing As in their living in the living seasons The time of the seasons and the constellations The time of milking and the time of harvest The time of the coupling of man and woman And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

T. S. Eliot
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.

T. S. Eliot
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable.

T. S. Eliot
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure.

T. S. Eliot
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

T. S. Eliot
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are infolded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

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