Quotes By 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.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

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.

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.

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

You are the music while the music lasts.

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.

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

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

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.

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

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

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

So the lover must struggle for words.

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.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

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 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.

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

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.

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

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