Quotes By T. S. Eliot

My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.

If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it."

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

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

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.

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.

Home is where one starts from.

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

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

Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm, retreating to the corner of arm and knee, eager to be reassured, taking pleasure in the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree.

The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.

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.

All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

This love is silent.

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

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 had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.

The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

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.

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

So the lover must struggle for words.

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

There is no method but to be very intelligent.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.