Quotes By T. S. Eliot

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

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

There is no method but to be very intelligent.

Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.

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.

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.

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.

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

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.

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

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.

It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.

There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.

Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.