Quotes By T. S. Eliot

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

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.

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

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

You are the music while the music lasts.

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

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

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

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

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

So the lover must struggle for words.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

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

Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.

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.

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.

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.

Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

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