T.S. Eliot Quotes

Sensibility alters from generation to generation in everybody, whether we will or no; but expression is only altered by a man of genius.

The devil tempts us not--'tis we tempt him, Reckoning his skill with opportunity.

You are a good young man," she said. "But I do not like husbands. I will never have another.

Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat.

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.

The dripping blood our only drink, The bloody flesh our only food: In spite of which we like to think That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

Death was not to be a leap: it was to be a long descent under thickening shadows.

All time is unreedemable.

Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake.

Habit is the beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectfully and unhappy men to live calmly

All time is eternal, moving inexorably toward an end which we believe is a result of our actions, but over which our control is mere illusion.

So the lover must struggle for words.

How wild it was, to let it be.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

I don't see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one woman to love him dearly.

No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.

Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

Business today consists in persuading crowds.

Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.

I do not think we should be trying to save our freedom by killing the safeguards that keep our liberties.

It is my hope that as we commemorate Black History Month in the future, we will continue to celebrate the many achievements and rich culture of African-Americans.

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

While Haiti has recently celebrated more than 200 years of independence from French colonial rule, the citizens of the island remain vulnerable to poverty, poor health, and political chaos.

I'm not one of those that can see the cat in the dairy and wonder what she's there for.

As they who make Good luck a god count all unlucky men.

Resolve will melt no rocks. But it can scale them.

Conscience is harder than our enemies, Knows more, accuses with more nicety.

We took up our positions, in obedience to instructions.

Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.

Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.

[It is easier] to quell emotion than to incur the consequences of venting it.

Love supreme defies all sophistry.

A mother's yearning feels the presence of the cherished child even in the degraded man.

The idea of duty--that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self--is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life.

What is opportunity to the man who cant use it?

A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones.

That's what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he's wise.

We shall not cease from exploration

College mostly makes people like bladders-just good for nothing but t'hold the stuff as is poured into 'em.

We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire.

There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest.

Our vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one of us differs from another.

Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness.

Death is the only physician, the shadow of his valley the only journeying that will cure us of age and the gathering fatigue of years.

When one is five-and-twenty, one has not chalk-stones at one's finger-ends that the touch of a handsome girl should be entirely indifferent.