Quotes By T. S. Eliot

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

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.

Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

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

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

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

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.

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.

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

You are the music while the music lasts.

April is the cruellest month.

Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.

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

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

Business today consists in persuading crowds.

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

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

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

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.

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.

In my beginning is my end.

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.

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."

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.

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