80 T.S. Eliot Quotes

“Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.” –

“A wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude toward God.” –

“We don’t actually fear death, we fear that no one will notice our absence, that we will disappear without a trace.” –

“We do not pass through the same door twice or return to the door through which we did not pass” –

“There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.” –

“If you do not push the boundaries, you will never know where they are.” –

“Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.” –

“If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?” –

“The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.” –

“And indeed there will be time to wonder, ‘Do I dare?’, and ‘Do I dare?” –

“Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.” –

“The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” –

“People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced.” –

“People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.” –

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”” –

“Time past and time future what might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.” –

“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.” –

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” –

“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.” –

“A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can’t be much good.” –

“And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.” –

“An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.” –

“Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.” –

“If we really want to pray we must first learn to listen, for in the silence of the heart God speaks.” –

“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.” –

“For I have known them all already, known them all— Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” –

“Playwriting gets into your blood and you can’t stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.” –

“This is the way the world ends – not with a bang but a whimper.” –

“The last act is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the wrong reason.” –

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality.” –

“Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.” –

“Finding a way to live the simple life is one of life’s supreme complications.” –

“If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.” –

“April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.” –

“I learn a great deal by merely observing you, and letting you talk as long as you please, and taking note of what you do not say.” –

“Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self.” –

“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.” –

“Success is relative. It is what we make of the mess we have made of things.” –

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.” –

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” –

“Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.” –

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” –

“Art serves us best precisely at that point where it can shift our sense of what is possible, when we know more than we knew before, when we feel we have – by some manner of a leap – encountered the truth. That, by the logic of art, is always worth the pain.” –

“Everyone gets the experience. Some get the lesson.” –

“You are the music while the music lasts.” –

“Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.” –

“Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste and end by debauching it.” –

“The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.” –

“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.” –

“The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.” –

“We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.” –

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice. ” – Little Gidding

“The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.” –

“The tendency of liberals is to create bodies of men and women-of all classes-detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion-mob rule. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined.” –

“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.” –

“O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.” –

“Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past.” –

“I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.” –

“No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest – for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.” –

“Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter.” –

“The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.” –

“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?” –

“It’s not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them.” –

“Men dislike being awakened from their death in life.” –

“Do I dare disturb the universe? In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” –

“We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.” –

“He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.” –

“Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.” –

“Turn things you’ve always wanted to do, into things you’ve done.” –

“It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.” –

“A people without history is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern of timeless moments.” –

“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.” –

“Between the idea and the reality between the motion and the act, falls the shadow” –

“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.” –

“For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” –

“Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.” –

“It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous. Resign yourself to be the fool you are… …We must always take risks. That is our destiny.” –

“It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.” –

“In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away.” –

“Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.” –