Quotes By T. S. Eliot
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.
T. S. Eliot
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
T. S. Eliot
I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.
T. S. Eliot
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."
T. S. Eliot
We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
T. S. Eliot
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.
T. S. Eliot
O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.
T. S. Eliot
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.
T. S. Eliot
The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.
T. S. Eliot
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.
T. S. Eliot
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.
T. S. Eliot