T. S. Eliot's Quotes

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

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

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

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

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.

It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.

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

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.

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.'

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.

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.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

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

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

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.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

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.

You are the music while the music lasts.

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

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

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.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Home is where one starts from.

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

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

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.

This love is silent.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.