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 Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a hi...
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