Quotes By T. S. Eliot

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

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

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

It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.

The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself.

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

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.

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

April is the cruellest month.

It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.

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

There is no method but to be very intelligent.

Business today consists in persuading crowds.

A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.

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.

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. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

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.

In my beginning is my end.

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.

Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?

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."

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

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

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

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

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.