T.S. Eliot quote: "Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love."

My mind may be American but my heart is British.
T.S. ELIOT

Distracted from distraction by distraction
T.S. ELIOT

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice...
T.S. ELIOT

What is hell? Hell is oneself.
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections...
T.S. ELIOT

Unreal friendship may turn to real
But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended
T.S. ELIOT

...the mind is conscious, but conscious of nothing - I said to my soul, be still, and wait without h...
T.S. ELIOT

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

We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we star...
T.S. ELIOT

To approach the stranger is to invite the unexpected, release a new force, let the genie out of the ...
T.S. ELIOT

My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand.
T.S. ELIOT

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
T.S. ELIOT

For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice.
T.S. ELIOT

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolong...
T.S. ELIOT

Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter.
T.S. ELIOT

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

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is th...
T.S. ELIOT

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

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
T.S. ELIOT

There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.
T.S. ELIOT

In my end is my beginning.
T.S. ELIOT

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is w...
T.S. ELIOT

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity
T.S. ELIOT

Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.
T.S. ELIOT

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
...
T.S. ELIOT

The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.
T.S. ELIOT

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
T.S. ELIOT

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

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
T.S. ELIOT

I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait ...
T.S. ELIOT

April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desir...
T.S. ELIOT

These fragments I have shored against my ruins
T.S. ELIOT

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisi...
T.S. ELIOT

Will the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee, T.S. ELIOT

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive whe...
T.S. ELIOT

Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.
T.S. ELIOT

Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth.
T.S. ELIOT

What we know of other people's only our memory of the moments during which we knew them.
T.S. ELIOT

It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good.
T.S. ELIOT

There's no vocabulary For love within a family, love that's lived in But not looked at, love within ...
T.S. ELIOT

There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or...
T.S. ELIOT

Here, said she, / Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor.
T.S. ELIOT

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

One of the low on whom assurance sits / As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
T.S. ELIOT

I grow old . . . I grow old . . . / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
T.S. ELIOT

Where is wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T.S. ELIOT

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

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

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.
T.S. ELIOT

It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lov...
T.S. ELIOT

April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirrin...
T.S. ELIOT

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

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; / Am an attendant lord.
T.S. ELIOT

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is eno...
T.S. ELIOT

So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are...
T.S. ELIOT

For I have known them all already, know them all -- have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I...
T.S. ELIOT

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
T.S. ELIOT

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, / And in short, I was afraid.
T.S. ELIOT

It's not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them.
T.S. ELIOT

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of pe...
T.S. ELIOT

The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future o...
T.S. ELIOT

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.
T.S. ELIOT

So I find words I never thought to speak

In streets I never thought I should revisit
T.S. ELIOT

Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird meaning death
T.S. ELIOT

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And a hundred visions and revisions
T.S. ELIOT

Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance
T.S. ELIOT

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to m...
T.S. ELIOT

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T.S. ELIOT

Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the publ...
T.S. ELIOT

In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in.
T.S. ELIOT

that which is only living
Can only die
T.S. ELIOT

What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal seren...
T.S. ELIOT

Time present and time past / are both perhaps present in time future.
T.S. ELIOT

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

At the still point, there the dance is.
T.S. ELIOT

What the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication<...
T.S. ELIOT

I do not know much about gods;but I think that the river is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and i...
T.S. ELIOT

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.
T.S. ELIOT

Or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the musi...
T.S. ELIOT

A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
T.S. ELIOT

All time is unreedemable.
T.S. ELIOT

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it...
T.S. ELIOT

Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear...
T.S. ELIOT

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
T.S. ELIOT

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same h...
T.S. ELIOT

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presenc...
T.S. ELIOT

Only through time time is conquered
T.S. ELIOT

I am glad you have a Cat, but I do not believe it is So remarkable a cat as My Cat.
T.S. ELIOT

time past and time future
what might have been and what has been
point to one end, which i...
T.S. ELIOT

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive whe...
T.S. ELIOT

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the year...
T.S. ELIOT

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues ...
T.S. ELIOT

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contain...
T.S. ELIOT

Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
T.S. ELIOT

Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, in...
T.S. ELIOT

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
T.S. ELIOT

If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter
T.S. ELIOT

You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends, and how, how rare and strange it is, to find i...
T.S. ELIOT

My name is only an anagram of toilets.
T.S. ELIOT

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice....
T.S. ELIOT

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, / Glowed on the marble.
T.S. ELIOT

When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives hi...
T.S. ELIOT

What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?
T.S. ELIOT

This love is silent.
T.S. ELIOT

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form ...
T.S. ELIOT

You are the music while the music lasts.
T.S. ELIOT

If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, you must accept the terms it offers ...
T.S. ELIOT

The winter evening settles down / With smell of steaks in passage ways.
T.S. ELIOT

Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right; decide on what you think is right and stick to it.
T.S. ELIOT

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

Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, adv...
T.S. ELIOT

The river is within us, the sea is all about us; The sea is the land's edge also
T.S. ELIOT

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our se...
T.S. ELIOT

Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.
T.S. ELIOT

Footfalls echo in the memory, Down the passage which we did not take, Towards the door we never open...
T.S. ELIOT

Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.
T.S. ELIOT

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of pe...
T.S. ELIOT

In my beginning is my end.
T.S. ELIOT

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T.S. ELIOT

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T.S. ELIOT

It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the 'dear dece...
T.S. ELIOT

Donne, I suppose, was such another / Who found no substitute for sense. / To seize and clutch and pe...
T.S. ELIOT

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
T.S. ELIOT

I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids/Sprouting despondently at area gates.
T.S. ELIOT

Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers.
T.S. ELIOT

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and ye...
T.S. ELIOT

The wounded surgeon plies the steel / That questions the distempered part.
T.S. ELIOT

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none t...
T.S. ELIOT

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

Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow.
T.S. ELIOT

And I will show you something different from either your shadow at morning striding behind you or yo...
T.S. ELIOT

I do not approve the extermination of the enemy; the policy of exterminating or, as it is barbarousl...
T.S. ELIOT

Radio is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at th...
T.S. ELIOT

After the erection of the Chinese Wall of Milton, blank verse has suffered not only arrest but retro...
T.S. ELIOT

At the first turning of the second stair / I turned and saw below / The same shape twisted on the ba...
T.S. ELIOT

The dove descending breaks the air / With flame of incandescent terror.
T.S. ELIOT

People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.
T.S. ELIOT

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mea...
T.S. ELIOT

If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it ...
T.S. ELIOT

But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will...
T.S. ELIOT

He's outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.)
And his footprints are not found in ...
T.S. ELIOT

Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door.
His name, as I ought to have told you before,
Is reall...
T.S. ELIOT

With Cats, some say, one rule is true:
Don’t speak till you are spoken to.
Myself, I do ...
T.S. ELIOT

Before a Cat will condescend
To treat you as a trusted friend,
Some little token of esteem...
T.S. ELIOT

The Pekes and the Pollicles, everyone knows,
Are proud and implacable, passionate foes;
I...
T.S. ELIOT

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may...
T.S. ELIOT

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

And we must think no further of you.
T.S. ELIOT

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well...
T.S. ELIOT

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we li...
T.S. ELIOT

Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, /...
T.S. ELIOT

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unsp...
T.S. ELIOT

For he will do
As he do do
And there's no doing anything about it!
T.S. ELIOT

To country people Cows are mild,
And flee from any stick they throw;
But I’m a timid tow...
T.S. ELIOT

We have only to conquer
Now, by suffering. This is the easier victory.
Now is the triumph...
T.S. ELIOT

Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke ...
T.S. ELIOT

One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in t...
T.S. ELIOT

The one thing you can do is to do nothing. Wait . . . You will find that you survive humiliation and...
T.S. ELIOT

Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorati...
T.S. ELIOT

Clear the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! take stone from stone and wash them.
T.S. ELIOT

I like not only to be loved, but to be told I am loved.
T.S. ELIOT

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences...
T.S. ELIOT

Ash on an old man's sleeve / Is all the ash the burnt roses leave, / Dust in the air suspended / Mar...
T.S. ELIOT

The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human ...
T.S. ELIOT

My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measu...
T.S. ELIOT

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.
T.S. ELIOT

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to ...
T.S. ELIOT

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
T.S. ELIOT

All cases are unique and very similar to others.
T.S. ELIOT

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and ...
T.S. ELIOT

When lovely woman stoops to folly and / Paces about her room again, alone, / She smoothes her hair w...
T.S. ELIOT

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes.
T.S. ELIOT

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test o...
T.S. ELIOT

Human kind cannot bear much reality.
T.S. ELIOT

If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being ca...
T.S. ELIOT

In the vain laughter of folly, wisdom hears half its applause.
T.S. ELIOT

To hear the latest Pole / transmit the Preludes, through his hair and fingertips.
T.S. ELIOT

Friendship should be more than biting time can sever.
T.S. ELIOT

That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
T.S. ELIOT

Whatever you do, don't whimper, but take the consequences.
T.S. ELIOT

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.
T.S. ELIOT

Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it.
T.S. ELIOT

I said to my soul be still, and wait without hope; for hope would be hope of the wrong thing; wait w...
T.S. ELIOT

When a Cat adopts you there is nothing to be done about it except put up with it until the wind chan...
T.S. ELIOT

The highest form of treason: to do the right thing for the wrong reason. Murder in the Cathedral
T.S. ELIOT

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
T.S. ELIOT

Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin.
T.S. ELIOT

I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is fa...
T.S. ELIOT

The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.
T.S. ELIOT

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.
T.S. ELIOT

When one wanted one's interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to ...
T.S. ELIOT

For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afterno...
T.S. ELIOT

Do I dare Disturb the universe?
T.S. ELIOT

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with s...
T.S. ELIOT

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
T.S. ELIOT

There is shadow under this red rock // (Come in under the shadow of this red rock) // And I will sho...
T.S. ELIOT

Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Prec...
T.S. ELIOT

We understand the ordinary business of living,
We know how to work the machine
T.S. ELIOT

Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead.
T.S. ELIOT

It is certain that a book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.
T.S. ELIOT

We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during wh...
T.S. ELIOT

T.S. Eliot

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