T. S. Eliot quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

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

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.

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

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

April is the cruellest month.

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

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

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

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Home is where one starts from.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

A christian martyrdom is never an accident, for Saints are not made by accident.

The trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things about God and man which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel towards God and man as they did.

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."

Sovegna vos.Here are the years that walk between, bearingAway the fiddles and the flutes, restoringOne who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearingWhite light folded, sheathed about her, folded.The new years walk, restoringThrough a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoringWith a new verse the ancient rhyme. RedeemThe time. RedeemThe unread vision in the higher dreamWhile jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse."

We see the light but see not whence it comes. O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!"

For our own past is covered by the currents of action,But the torment of others remains an experienceUnqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.People change, and smile: but the agony abides."

Touch meIt's so easy to leave meAll alone with my memoryOf my days in the sunIf you touch meYou'll understand what happiness isLook, a new day has began"

Artistic inevitability lies in the complete adequacy of the external to the emotion.

The nightingales are singing near The Convent of the Sacred Heart, And sang within the bloody wood When Agamemnon cried aloud, And let their liquid siftings fall To stain the stiff dishonored shroud.

So the lover must struggle for words.

My name is only an anagram of toilets.

If you find examples of humanism which are anti-religious, or at least in opposition to the religious faith of the place and time, then such humanism is purely destructive, for it has never found anything to replace what it has destroyed.

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

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

Cling, swing, Spring, sing, Swing up into the apple tree.

April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.

Here were decent godless people; Their only monument the asphalt road And a thousand lost golf balls.

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.'

When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.

I must say Bernard Shaw is greatly improved by music.

Friendship should be more than biting time can sever.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel That questions the distempered part; Beneath the bleeding hands we feel The sharp compassion of the healer's art Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Birth, and copulation, and death; that's all the facts when you come to brass tacks.

The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o'clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps.

I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

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

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

The True Church can never fail. For it is based upon a rock.

I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Cold Mountain Buddhas Han Shan Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness be dancing. Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning. The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry, The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony Of death and birth.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

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.

Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow

Business today consists in persuading crowds.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison.

In spite of all the dishonour, the broken standards, the broken lives, The broken faith in one place or another, There was something left that was more than the tales Of old men on winter evenings.

Disillusion can become itself an illusion If we rest in it.

We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors' victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.

Distracted from distraction by distraction

The usual dog about the town is much inclined to play the clown.

Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.

You are the music while the music lasts.

The dripping blood our only drink, The bloody flesh our only food: In spite of which we like to think That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

There are flood and drought over the eyes and in the mouth, dead water and dead sand contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil gapes at the vanity of toil, laughs without mirth. This is the death of the earth.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

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

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

To make an end is to make a beginning.

In my beginning is my end.

To approach the stranger is to invite the unexpected, release a new force, let the genie out of the bottle. It is to start a new train of events that is beyond your control...

Old men ought to be explorers.

The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started.

Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

There's no vocabulary For love within a family, love that's lived in But not looked at, love within the light of which All else is seen, the love within which All other love finds speech. This love is silent.

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

Shall I part my hair behind Do I dare to eat a peach I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

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

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be: am an attendant lord, one that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two, advise the prince.

[On The Waste Land:] Various critics have done me the honor to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world, have considered it, indeed, as an important bit of social criticism. To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.

For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice.

The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man

There are three conditions which often look alike Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference, ... .

Shape without form, shade without color, Paralyzed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom Remember us-if at all-not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.

We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Learning together.

Fading, fading: strength beyond hope and despair climbing the third stair. Lord, I am not worthy Lord, I am not worthy but speak the word only.

I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids Sprouting despondently at area gates.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

The endless cycle of idea and action, / Endless invention, endless experiment, / Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; / Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; / Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.

War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

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

Each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

The name that no human research can discover-- But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess. When you notice a cat in profound meditation, The reason, I tell you, is always the same: His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name: His ineffable effable Effanineffable Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant

To justify Christian morality because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion.

We can say of Shakespeare, that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.

There is no such thing as a lost cause, because there is no such thing as a gained cause

Success is relative. It is what we make of the mess we have made of things.

I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.

There is no method but to be very intelligent.

time past and time future what might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.

The tendency of liberals is to create bodies of men and women-of all classes-detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion-mob rule. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined.