T. S. Eliot Quotes

The eastern light our spires touch at morning, The light that slants upon our western doors at evening, The twilight over stagnant pools at batflight, Moon light and star light, owl and moth light, Glow-worm glowlight on a grassblade. O Light Invisible, we worship Thee!

Our emotions
Are only "incidents"
In the effort to keep day and night together.

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And in short, I was afraid.

To make an end is to make a beginning.

What is this self inside us, this silent observer,
Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us
And urge us to futile activity,
And in the end, Judge us still more severely,
For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?

And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, Falls the shadow.

For he will do
As he do do
And there's no doing anything about it!

Those who talk of the bible as a monument of English prose are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.

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

When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom, the work is likely to sprawl.

In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing

What we know of other people's only our memory of the moments during which we knew them.

A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter.

Turn things you've always wanted to do, into things you've done

Home is where one starts from.

This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a band but a whimper.

Without Christianity we might, of course, merely sink into an apathetic decline

My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms

O Light Invisible, we praise Thee!
Too bright for mortal vision.
O Greater Light, we praise Thee for the less;
The eastern light our spires touch at morning,
The light that slants upon our western doors at evening,
The twilight over stagnant pools at batflight,
Moon light and star light, owl and moth light,
Glow-worm glowlight on a grassblade.
O Light Invisible, we worship Thee!
We thank Thee for the light that we have kindled,
The light of altar and of sanctuary;
Small lights of those who meditate at midnight
And lights directed through the coloured panes of windows
And light reflected from the polished stone,
The gilded carven wood, the coloured fresco.
Our gaze is submarine, our eyes look upward
And see the light that fractures through unquiet water.
We see the light but see not whence it comes.
O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!

And I must borrow every changing shape
To find expression ... dance, dance
Like a dancing bear,
Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.
Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance

No scheme for a change of society can be made to appear immediately palatable, except by falsehood, until society has become so desperate that it will accept any change.

I that was near your heart was removed therefrom

Believe me, Michael:
Those who flee from the past will always lose the race.
I know this from experience. When you reach your goal,
Your imagined paradise of success and grandeur,
You will find your past failures waiting there to greet you.

We should not confuse information with knowledge.

The morning comes to consciousness

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds, ... for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

We acknowledge our trespass, our weakness, our fault; we acknowledge That the sin of the world is upon our heads; that the blood of the martyrs and the agony of the saints Is upon our heads. Lord, have mercy upon us. Christ, have mercy upon us. Lord, have mercy upon us. Blessed Thomas, pray for us.

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.

My mind may be American but my heart is British.

One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. 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.

What is hell? Hell is oneself.
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

Oh, I thought that I was giving him so much!
And he to me - and the giving and the taking
Seemed so right: not in terms of calculation
Of what was good for the persons we had been
But for the new person, us. If I could feel
As I did then, even now it would seem right.
And then I found we were only strangers
And that there had been neither giving nor taking
But that we had merely made use of each other
Each for his purpose. That's horrible. Can we only love
Something created by our own imagination?
Are we all in fact unloving and unlovable?
The one is alone, and if one is alone
Then lover and beloved are equally unreal
And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams.

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

I gotta use words to talk to you.

Along the city streets
It is still high tide,
Yet the garrulous waves of life
Shrink and divide
With a thousand incidents
Vexed and debated:–
This is the hour for which we waited–
This is the ultimate hour
When life is justified.
The seas of experience
That were so broad and deep,
So immediate and steep,
Are suddenly still.
You may say what you will,
At such peace I am terrified.
There is nothing else beside.

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

It is not enough to understand what we ought to be, unless we know what we are; and we do not understand what we are, unless we know what we ought to be.

You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,
And how, how rare and strange it is, to find
In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,
(For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? you are not blind! How keen you are!)
To find a friend who has these qualities,
Who has, and gives
Those qualities upon which friendship lives.
How much it means that I say this to you-
Without these friendships-life, what cauchemar!

Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative.

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away.

Poetry is not an assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.

The pain of living and the drug of dreams
curl up the small soul in the window seat.

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.

Turning Wearily, as one would turn to nod goodbye to Rochefoucauld, If the street were time and he as the end of the street.

I don't know much about gods, but I think the river is a strong, brown god

This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.

People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced.

The difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

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

If time and space, as sages say,
Are things which cannot be,
The sun which does not feel decay
No greater is than we.
So why, Love, should we ever pray
To live a century?
The butterfly that lives a day
Has lived eternity.

In a world of fugitives the one who stays home will seem to be running away

A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers.
As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.

The ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes

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

Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.

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

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. 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.

We have only to conquer
Now, by suffering. This is the easier victory.
Now is the triumph of the cross.

The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.

Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

The detective story, as created by Poe, is something as specialised and as intellectual as a chess problem, whereas the best English detective fiction has relied less on the beauty of the mathematical problem and much more on the intangible human element. [ ... ] In The Moonstone the mystery is finally solved, not altogether by human ingenuity, but largely by accident. Since Collins, the best heroes of English detective fiction have been, like Sergeant Cuff, fallible.

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

Heretic ... is a person who seizes upon a truth and pushes it to the point at which it becomes a falsehood.

The young feel tired at the end of an action, the old at the beginning.

The communication/of the dead is tongued with fire beyond/the language of the living
The Little Gidding

There is nothing at all to be done about it, There is nothing to do about anything.

The world revolves like ancient women, gathering fuel in vacant lots.

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

His laughter tinkled among the teacups.

In the life of one man, never The same time returns.

What day is the day that we know that we hope for or fear for?
Every day is the day we should hear from or hope from.
One moment
Weighs like another. Only in retrospection, selection,
We say, that was the day. The critical moment
That is always now, and here. Even now, in sordid particulars
The eternal design may appear.

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.

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.

We ask only to be reassured
About the noises in the cellar
And the window that should not have been open

The fool,fixed in his folly,may think He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

Our second danger is to associate tradition with the immovable; to think of it as something hostile to all change; to aim to return to some previous condition which we imagine as having been capable of preservation in perpetuity, instead of aiming to stimulate the life which produced that condition in its time ... a tradition without intelligence is not worth having ...

They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.

In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur and faeces, Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

The purpose of a Christian education would not be merely to make men and women pious Christians: a system which aimed too rigidly at this end alone would become only obscurantist. A Christian education must primarily teach people to be able to think in Christian categories.

I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;Her coat is one of the tabby kind,with tiger stripes and lepard spots.

You are here to kneel.

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

from "The Dry Salvages

Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

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.

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is a life.

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.

There are evil neighborhoods of noise and evil neighborhoods of silence, and Eeldrop and Appleplex preferred the latter, as being the more evil. It

What is true, is true only for one time and only for one place.

That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

A wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and that the consequence is an inevitable doom. For a long enough time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet.

Can we only love
Something created in our own imaginations?

Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated And let my cry come unto Thee.

Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door.
His name, as I ought to have told you before,
Is really Asparagus. That's such a fuss
To pronounce, that we usually call him just Gus.
His coat's very shabby, he's thin as a rake,
And he suffers from palsy that makes his paw shake.
Yet he was, in his youth, quite the smartest of Cats -
But no longer a terror to mice or to rats.
For he isn't the Cat that he was in his prime;
Though his name was quite famous, he says, in his time.
And whenever he joins his friends at their club
(which takes place at the back of the neighbouring pub)
He loves to regale them, if someone else pays,
With anecdotes drawn from his palmiest days.
For he once was a Star of the highest degree -
He has acted with Irving, he's acted with Tree.
And he likes to relate his success on the Halls,
Where the Gallery once gave him seven cat-calls.
But his grandest creation, as he loves to tell,
Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.