T.S. Eliot Quotes

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.

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

We must not sit still and look for miracles; up and doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus, will do anything.

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

All the learnin' my father ever paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and the alphabet at th ' other.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.

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

It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.

We shall not cease from exploration

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

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.

Love supreme defies all sophistry.

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

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.

We took up our positions, in obedience to instructions.

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

The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without.

In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.

He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it

And all shall be well and/ All manner of thing shall be well/ By the purification of the motive/ In the ground of our beseeching

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.

In travelling I shape myself betimes to idleness And take fools' pleasure

When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smooths her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone.

My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand.

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.

There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.

Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall My buried life, and Paris in the spring, I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world To be wonderful and youthful afterall

A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after - and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.

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

You can evade life, but you can not evade Death.

Justice itself tends to be corrupted by political passion.

When a Cat adopts you, and I am not superstitious at all I don't mean only Black cats there is nothing to be done about it except to put up with it and wait until the wind changes.

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.

Yet, nearly 6 decades after the Holocaust concluded, Anti-Semitism still exists as the scourge of the world.

If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.

We can say of Shakespeare, that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.

Talent imitates, genius steals.

Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it.

Let us remember that the times which future generations delight to recall are not those of ease and prosperity, but those of adversity bravely borne.

A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

You have to risk going too far to discover just how far you can really go.

Tradition: how the vitality of the past enriches the life of the present.

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

History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Can we only love Something created in our own imaginations?