Eliot Quotes

As to his religious notions - why, as Voltaire said, incantations will destroy a flock of sheep if administered with a certain quantity of arsenic. ~ George Eliot

When I was four, I think I just wanted to make noise. When I was about 10 years old I was given five CDs for my birthday: Pink Floyd's Dark side of the Moon, the Sex Pistols, Prodigy, Jimi Hendrix, and I can't remember the fifth one, but really different kinds of music. That's when I started to grasp it and enjoy it, listening to it. Then I started being in bands at school. ~ Eliot Paulina Sumner

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear ~ T. S. Eliot

Who can prove Wit to be witty when with deeper ground Dulness intuitive declares wit dull? ~ George Eliot

Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, Falls the shadow. ~ T. S. Eliot

There is no sorrow I have thought about more than that - to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail. ~ George Eliot

So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood. Doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot, but it is gone for ever from our imagination, and we can only BELIEVE in the joy of childhood. ~ George Eliot

You need to own your feelings. Get more comfortable expressing yourself."
"How about I express you out the nearest window? ~ Greg Cox

People who write finely must not expect to be left in repose; they will be molested with thanks, at least. ~ George Eliot

Who's to know what makes a bird wake up and decide to change its song? It was written that our world would change and it changed. ~ Eliot Pattison

A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills. ~ George Eliot

Be unselfish. That is the first and final commandment for those who would be useful and happy in their usefulness. If you think of yourself only, you cannot develop because you are choking the source of development, which is spiritual expansion through thought for others. ~ Charles William Eliot

By seeking what was needful for Eppie, by sharing the effect that everything produced on her, he had himself come to appropriate the forms of custom and belief which were the mould of Raveloe life; and as, with reawakening sensibilities, memory also reawakened, he had begun to ponder over the elements of his old faith, and blend them with his new impressions, till he recovered a consciousness of unity between his past and present. ~ George Eliot

The thirst that from the soul doth rise, Doth ask a drink divine. ~ George Eliot

We are children of a large family, and must learn, as such children do, not to expect that our little hurts will be made much of - to be content with little nurture and caressing, and help each other the more. ~ George Eliot

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 ~ T. S. Eliot

Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life. ~ George Eliot

The early months of marriage often are times of critical tumult,
whether that of a shrimp pool or of deeper water,
which afterwards subside into cheerful peace. ~ George Eliot

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. ~ T. S. Eliot

Most of the makers of the twentieth-century mind, figures such as Freud, Heisenberg, Picasso, Joyce, and Eliot, have in common an about-face on the subject-object question and the mindmatter question; they all reject the dualism that arbitrarily and irreversibly splits the world into pieces. This rejection of dualism and the corresponding reach for monism are of the essence in understanding the revolutionary nature of twentieth-century science and art. ~ Jewel Spears Brooker

Our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and of our visible, sensible world. ~ T. S. Eliot

Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being. ~ T. S. Eliot

Translation is not appropriation, as is sometimes claimed; it is a form of listening that then changes how you speak. ~ Eliot Weinberger

There was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow. ~ George Eliot

When gratitude has become a matter of reasoning there are many ways of escaping from its bonds. ~ George Eliot

Gifted with a liberty they know not how to use; with a power and energy they know not how to apply; with a life whose purpose and aim they comprehend not; they drag through their useless and convulsed existence. Byron ~ Charles Eliot

The old should be explorers, be curious, risk transgression, explore oldness itself. ~ T. S. Eliot

In the checkered area of human experience the seasons are all mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one tends the green cluster and another treads the winepress. Nay, in each of our lives harvest and spring-time are continually one, until himself gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields. ~ George Eliot

I'm still at the age where I'm constantly seeking approval of people I have respect for. ~ Eliot Paulina Sumner

Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. Even with no motive to be false, it is very hard to say the exact truth. ~ George Eliot

In the last few years everything I'd done up to sixty or so has seemed very childish. ~ T. S. Eliot

I am not at all sure that the majority of the human race have not been ugly, and even among those "lords of their kind," the British, squat figures, ill-shapen nostrils, and dingy complexions are not startling exceptions. Yet there is a great deal of family love amongst us. I have a friend or two whose class of features is such that the Apollo curl on the summit of their brows would be decidedly trying; yet to my certain knowledge tender hearts have beaten for them, and their miniatures - flattering, but still not lovely - are kissed in secret by motherly lips. I have seen many an excellent matron, who could have never in her best days have been handsome, and yet she had a packet of yellow love-letters in a private drawer, and sweet children showered kisses on her sallow cheeks. And I believe there have been plenty of young heroes, of middle stature and feeble beards, who have felt quite sure they could never love anything more insignificant than a Diana, and yet have found themselves in middle life happily settled with a wife who waddles. Yes! Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty - it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it. ~ George Eliot

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

My name is only an anagram of toilets. ~ T. S. Eliot

Most of us who turn to any subject with 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. ~ George Eliot

He and Janet talked like this all the time. The Fillorians didn't really get it, they thought High King Eliot and Queen Janet hated each other, but the truth was that in Quentin's absence Janet had become his principal confidante. Eliot supposed it was partly because they both found real romantic intimacy elusive and kind of uninteresting, so usually neither of them had a serious boyfriend, and they had to turn to each other for intelligent companionship. ~ Lev Grossman

Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking. ~ George Eliot

O Aristotle! if you had had the advantage of being "the freshest modern" instead of the greatest ancient, would you not have mingled your praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of high intelligence, with a lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without metaphor,–that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else? ~ George Eliot

She locked herself in her room. She needed time to get used to her maimed consciousness, her poor lopped life, before she could walk steadily to the place allotted her. A new searching light had fallen on her husband's character, and she could not judge him leniently: the twenty years in which she had believed in him and venerated him by virtue of his concealments came back with particulars that made them seem an odious deceit. He had married her with that bad past life hidden behind him, and she had no faith left to protest his innocence of the worst that was imputed to him. Her honest ostentatious nature made the sharing of a merited dishonor as bitter as it could be to any mortal.
But this imperfectly taught woman, whose phrases and habits were an odd patchwork, had a loyal spirit within her. The man whose prosperity she had shared through nearly half a life, and who had unvaryingly cherished her - now that punishment had befallen him it was not possible to her in any sense to forsake him. There is a forsaking which still sits at the same board and lies on the same couch with the forsaken soul, withering it the more by unloving proximity. She knew, when she locked her door, that she should unlock it ready to go down to her unhappy husband and espouse his sorrow, and say of his guilt, I will mourn and not reproach. But she needed time to gather up her strength; she needed to sob out her farewell to all the gladness and pride of her life. When she had resolved to go dow ~ George Eliot

We are angered even by the full acceptance of our humiliating confessions - how much more by hearing in hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer, those confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and strive against as if they were the oncoming of numbness! ~ George Eliot

He's so good at his job, that I've fallen for him, the mirage of him being my boyfriend, all of it. Like everyone else. Like an idiot. ~ Anne Eliot

Miss Brooke's large eyes seemed, like her religion, too unusual and striking. ~ George Eliot

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. ~ T. S. Eliot

Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity ~ T. S. Eliot

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later. ~ Robert Morgan

In the first moments when we come away from the presence of death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny. ~ George Eliot

The days were longer then (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. ~ George Eliot

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers. ~ T. S. Eliot

For every life and every act consequence of good and evil can be shown and as in time results of many deeds are blended so good and evil in the end become confounded. ~ T. S. Eliot

Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; 180 Departed, have left no addresses. ~ T. S. Eliot

But, for the point of wisdom, I would choose / To know the mind that stirs between the wings / Of bees ... ~ George Eliot

His soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying. His experience was of that pitiable kind which shrinks from pity, and fears most of all that is should be known: it was that proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough to spare for transformation into sympathy, and quivers threadlike in small currents of self-preoccupation or at best of an egoistic scrupulosity. ~ George Eliot

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.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? ~ T. S. Eliot

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it. ~ Gore Vidal

His laughter tinkled among the teacups. ~ T. S. Eliot

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what we imagine might have been. ~ George Eliot

Military and absolutist regimes are undoubtedly well fitted to get the jump on an unsuspecting or unprepared enemy; but the history of modern warfare proves that they cannot win over representative governments in the long run, provided that people behind those governments have the heart to sustain initial punishment, and both the will and the resources to fight back. ~ Samuel Eliot Morison

Speculative truth begins to appear but a shadow of individual minds, agreement between intellects seems unattainable, and we turn to the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union. ~ George Eliot

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

Truth on our level is a different thing from truth for the jellyfish. ~ T. S. Eliot

It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it. ~ George Eliot

That is the way with us when we have any uneasy jealousy in our disposition: if our talents are chiefly of the burrowing kind, our honey-sipping cousin (whom we have grave reasons for objecting to) is likely to have a secret contempt for us, and any one who admires him passes an oblique criticism on ourselves. Having the scruples of rectitude in our souls, we are above the meanness of injuring him - rather we meet all his claims on us by active benefits; and the drawing of cheques for him, being a superiority which he must recognize, gives our bitterness a milder infusion. ~ George Eliot

I repel all guys. Now I have proof. PROOF.
Wait till Jenna hears. Maybe I need a different deodorant?
She ran her tongue over her teeth. Or toothpaste? ~ Anne Eliot

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. ~ T. S. Eliot

It is never too late to be who you want to be. ~ George Eliot

In his eyes Hobbes, who had savaged the Church in Leviathan (1651), was unambiguously wicked, and excluding him was a pleasure. He told his friend Thomas Tyers that he had 'scorned' to quote Hobbes 'because I did not like his principles'.6 Among the texts he did cite, however, was John Bramhall's 1658 Castigations of Mr Hobbes, a book now known, if at all, for having been praised by T. S. Eliot. For ~ Henry Hitchings

The intensest form of hatred is that rooted in fear. ~ George Eliot

But he had something else to curse
his own viscious folly, which now seemed as mad and unaccountable to him as almost all our follies and vices do when their promptings have long passed away. ~ George Eliot

Only people who've been discriminated against can really know how much it hurts. Each person feels the pain in his own way, each has his own scars. So I think I'm as concerned about fairness and justice as anybody. But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T. S. Eliot calls hollow men. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they're doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don't want to. Like that lovely pair we just met." He sighs and twirls the long slender pencil in his hand. "Gays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas-- none of them bother me. I don't care what banner they raise. But what I can't stand are hollow people. When I'm with them I just can't bear it, and wind up saying things I shouldn't. With those women--I should've just let it slide, or else called Miss Saeki and let her handle it. She would have given them a smile and smoothed things over. But I just can't do "do that. I say things I shouldn't, do things I shouldn't do. I can't control myself. That's one of my weak points. Do you know why that's a weak point of mine?"
"'Cause if you take every single person who lacks much imagination seriously, there's no end to it," I say. ~ Haruki Murakami

Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self. ~ T. S. Eliot

I tell them that the only peace you find up on a mountain is the peace you bring with you. ~ Eliot Pattison

Well, well, my boy, if good luck knocks at your door, don't you put your head out at window and tell it to be gone about its business, that's all. ~ George Eliot

Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death Pray for us now and at the hour of our death. ~ T. S. Eliot

You know that it is only through work that you can achieve anything, either in college or in the world. ~ Charles William Eliot

A fine lady is a squirrel-headed thing, with small airs and small notions; about as applicable to the business of life as a pair of tweezers to the clearing of a forest. ~ George Eliot

I've read dozens of interviews and accounts that basically come down to How Poets Do It and the truth is they're all do-lally and they're all different. There's Gerard Manly Hopkins in his black Jesuit clothes lying face down on the ground to look at an individual bluebell, Robert Frost who never used a desk, was once caught short by a poem coming and wrote it on the sole of his shoe, T.S. Eliot in his I'm-not-a-Poet suit with his solid sensible available-for-poetry three hours a day, Ted Hughes folded into his tiny cubicle at the top of the stairs where there is no window, no sight or smell of earth or animal but the rain clatter on the roof bows him to the page, Pablo Neruda who grandly declared poetry should only ever be handwritten, and then added his own little bit of bonkers by saying: in green ink. Poets are their own nation. Most of them know. ~ Niall Williams

The progress of the world can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world. ~ George Eliot

The freedom of thought and expression is one of the most sacred rights in this country. ~ Eliot Engel

And I have known the eyes already, known them all
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume? ~ T. S. Eliot

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence. ~ George Eliot

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still ~ T. S. Eliot

Great performers require a measure of confidence that would strike many as absurd, unfounded, and downright irrational. They believe in themselves utterly, without question, even when everyone else is questioning how good (or sane) they are. ~ John Eliot

Sweet Truth is a queen proud and mighty
Her throne is in heaven above. ~ George Eliot

And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment. ~ George Eliot

We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger. ~ T. S. Eliot

And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it. ~ George Eliot

When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity. ~ George Eliot

I do not believe that politics in the long run is about individuals. It is about ideas. ~ Eliot Spitzer

What moments of despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity: and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated. ~ George Eliot

I can connect
Nothing with nothing ~ T. S. Eliot

Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation. ~ T. S. Eliot

Please don't tell me you drive with your eyes closed. ~ Anne Eliot

I always think the flowers can see us, and know what we are thinking about. ~ George Eliot

What a wretched lot of old shrivelled creatures we shall be by-and-by. Never mind - the uglier we get in the eyes of others, the lovelier we shall be to each other; that has always been my firm faith about friendship. ~ George Eliot

The saints were cowards who stood by to see Christ crucified: they should have flung themselves Upon the Roman spears, and died in vain
The grandest death, to die in vain
for love Greater than sways the forces of the world! ~ George Eliot

Eliot said that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." What he meant by that is, the emotional understanding comes before you understand the argument that follows later in the text. ~ Fred D'Aguiar

Unlikely accomplishments are borne out of single-minded purposefulness. Future superstars don't get there by keeping part of their heart in reserve. ~ John Eliot

If troubles were put up to market, I'd sooner buy old than new. It's something to have seen the worst. ~ George Eliot

There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Name me Edward, or Peeta, or Prince Charming, and I swear - I'll quit. ~ Anne Eliot