Quotes About T S Eliot
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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
Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, Falls the shadow. ~ T. S. 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
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
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
The old should be explorers, be curious, risk transgression, explore oldness itself. ~ T. S. Eliot
In the last few years everything I'd done up to sixty or so has seemed very childish. ~ T. S. 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
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
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
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
His laughter tinkled among the teacups. ~ T. S. 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, ~ T. S. Eliot
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. ~ T. S. Eliot
These fragments I have shored against my ruins ~ T. S. Eliot
It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored in climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both. ~ T. S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot's influence was enormous on my generation. Much more than Ezra Pound. I actually had to put T.S. Eliot books out of the house because my poetry was so influenced. Everything I wrote sounded like Eliot. ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Distracted from distraction by distraction ~ T. S. Eliot
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom ~ T. S. Eliot
But time past is a time forgotten.
We expect the rise of a new constellation. ~ T. S. Eliot
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter. ~ T. S. Eliot
The lamp hummed:
'Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smoothes the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars. ~ T. S. Eliot
If you do not push the boundaries, you will never know where they are. ~ T. S. Eliot
All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment. ~ T. S. Eliot
There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience. ~ T. S. Eliot
Though you forget the way to the Temple,
There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger. ~ T. S. Eliot
We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly. ~ T. S. Eliot
Dude is that was a Shakespeare quote duel, he just kicked your ass. Oberon
I know, but I slipped in some T.S.Eliot and he didn't even catch it. Hopefully next time I wont be recovering from an assassination attempt, and then I'll do better. - Atticus ~ Kevin Hearne
The nymphs are departed. ~ T. S. Eliot
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove. ~ T. S. Eliot
April is the cruellest month, breeding
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.
Summer surprised us. ~ T. S. Eliot
Shall we ever meet again?
And who will meet again?
Meeting is for strangers.
Meeting is for those who do not know each other. ~ T. S. Eliot
It is important that a man should feel himself to be, not merely a citizen of a particular nation, but a citizen of a particular part of his country, with local loyalties. These, like loyalty to class, arise out of loyalty to the family. Certainly, an individual may develop the warmest devotion to a place in which he was not born, and to a community with which he has no ancestral ties. But I think we should agree that there would be something artificial, something a little too conscious, about a community of people with strong local feeling, all of whom had come from somewhere else. I think we should say that we must wait for a generation or two for a loyalty which the inhabitants had inherited, and which was not the result of a conscious choice. On the whole, it would appear to be for the best that the great majority of human beings should go on living in the place in which they were born. Family, class and local loyalty all support each other; and if one of these decays, the others will suffer also."
From "Notes Towards the Definition of Culture," in Christianity and Culture, pg. 125. ~ T.S. Eliot
You will have to live with those memories and make them into something new. Only by acceptance of the past will you alter its meaning. ~ T. S. Eliot
I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones. ~ T. S. Eliot
I could see nothing behind that child's eye. 40
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him. ~ T. S. Eliot
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. ~ T. S. Eliot
Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment. ~ T. S. Eliot
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." - T. S. Eliot, from "East Coker ~ Kristin Hannah
To country people Cows are mild, And flee from any stick they throw; But I'm a timid town bred child, And all the cattle seem to know. ~ T. S. Eliot
As I grew up I developed some literary pretensions myself, and studied and wrote meticulous poetry informed by poets as diverse as T. S. Eliot, Rimbaud, and Judy Grahn. ~ Jo Weldon
For history is a pattern Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel History is now and England. ~ T. S. Eliot
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. ~ T. S. Eliot
The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide. ~ T. S. Eliot
Culture is not enough, even though nothing is enough without culture. ~ T. S. Eliot
Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, ~ T. S. Eliot
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand. ~ T. S. Eliot
John Milton (December 9, 1608 – November 8, 1674) was an English poet, prose polemicist, and civil servant for the English Commonwealth. Most famed for his epic poem Paradise Lost, Milton is celebrated as well for his eloquent treatise condemning censorship, Areopagitica. Long considered the supreme English poet, Milton experienced a dip in popularity after attacks by T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis in the mid 20th century; but with multiple societies and scholarly journals devoted to his study, Milton's reputation remains as strong as ever in the 21st century. Very soon after his death – and continuing to the present day – Milton became the subject of partisan biographies, confirming T.S. Eliot's belief that "of no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry, without our theological and political dispositions…making unlawful entry." Milton's radical, republican politics and heretical religious views, coupled with the perceived artificiality of his complicated Latinate verse, alienated Eliot and other readers; yet by dint of the overriding influence of his poetry and personality on subsequent generations - particularly the Romantic movement - the man whom Samuel Johnson disparaged as "an acrimonious and surly republican" must be counted one of the most significant writers and thinkers of all time. Source: Wikipedia ~ John Milton
Gin and drugs, dear lady, gin and drugs. ~ T. S. Eliot
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. ~ T. S. Eliot
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph. ~ T. S. Eliot
By this grace dissolved in place
What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger
Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye
Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters meet.
(from "Marina") ~ T. S. Eliot
This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy. ~ T. S. Eliot
Think not forever of yourselves, O Chiefs, nor of your own generation. Think of continuing generations of our families, think of our grandchildren and of those yet unborn, whose faces are coming from beneath the ground. ~ T. S. Eliot
You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles' heel.
You will go on, and when you have prevailed
You can say: at this point many a one has failed.
But what have I, but what have I, my friend,
To give you, what can you receive from me?
Only the friendship and the sympathy
Of one about to reach her journey's end. ~ T. S. Eliot
But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. ~ T. S. Eliot
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! ~ T. S. Eliot
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse ~ T. S. Eliot
The essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal; it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory. ~ T. S. Eliot
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil. ~ T. S. Eliot
The end is in the beginning. ~ T. S. Eliot
The morning comes to consciousness ~ T. S. Eliot
For he will do
As he do do
And there's no doing anything about it! ~ T. S. Eliot
When war is not just it is subsequently justified; so it becomes
many things. In reality, an unjust war is merely piracy.
It consists of piracy, ego and, more than anything, money.
War is our century's prostitution. ~ T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre, dissimilar enough as thinkers, both tend to undervalue prose and to deny it any imaginative function. Poetry is the creation of linguistic quasi-things; prose is for explanation and exposition, it is essentially didactic, documentary, informative. Prose is ideally transparent; it is only faute de mieux written in words. The influential modern stylist is Hemingway. It would be almost inconceivable now to write like Landor. Most modern English novels indeed are not written. One feels they could slip into some other medium without much loss. It takes a foreigner like Nabokov or an Irishman like Beckett to animate prose language into an imaginative stuff in its own right. ~ Iris Murdoch
Creativity is contagious. And so is banality. Criticism is an art in itself. Don't let the dullness around destroy the creativity within. T.S. Eliot said, "honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry." Good to remember ... ~ Elif Shafak
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock; ~ T.S. Eliot
With a poem you can say 'I got my feeling into words for myself. I now have the equivalent in words for that much of what I have felt.' ~ T. S. Eliot
Humankind cannot bear very much reality. ~ T. S. Eliot
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing ~ T. S. Eliot
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. ~ T. S. Eliot
Shape without form, shade without colour, paralyzed force, gesture without motion ... ~ T. S. Eliot
The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn. ~ T. S. Eliot
And so each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate ~ T. S. Eliot
This form, this face, this life living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken, the awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships. ~ T. S. Eliot
My mind may be American but my heart is British. ~ T. S. Eliot
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; ~ T. S. Eliot
Every moment is a new and shocking transvaluation of all we have ever been. ~ T. S. Eliot
The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills. ~ George Orwell
The wilderness is cracked and browned But through the water pale and thin Still shine the unoffending feet And there above the painter set 15 The Father and the Paraclete. . ~ T. S. Eliot
Men tighten the knot of confusion Into perfect misunderstanding. ~ T. S. Eliot