T.S. Eliot Quotes
There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence.
It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.
Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us; there have been many circulation of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is.
It is the way with half the truth amidst which we live, that it only haunts us and makes dull pulsations that are never born into sound.
Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm.
For character too is a process and an unfolding. . . among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful. . . .
Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.
Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science.
I say to you: Make perfect your will. / I say: take no thought of the harvest, / But only of proper sowing.
Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.
In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.
It's them as take advantage that get advantage I' this world, I think: folks have to wait long enough afore it's brought to 'em.
Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance!
Here between the hither and the farther shore While time is withdrawn, consider the future And the past with an equal mind.
Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be. . . .
When the gods know that a god hath fallen, With this kindly feeling They do encourage him-- Be thou a god again and again.
'Character," says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms - character is destiny'.
Anyone who strays too far from the majority view or the conventional wisdom is bound to be labeled "arrogant," "a maverick," "a Wildman," "weird," or even "crazy."
Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.
High achievers dwell on what they do well and spend very little time evaluating themselves and their performances.
The true exceptional performer is on super pilot. Every single sense, every fiber of his body is brought together in what he is doing.
Neither way is better. / Both ways are necessary. / It is also necessary / To make a choice between them.
It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.
But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.
Each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.
One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen's miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.
Love is frightened at the intervals of insensibility and callousness that encroach by little and little on the domain of grief, and it makes efforts to recall the keenness of the first anguish.
