T.S. Eliot Quotes

bad literature of the sort called amusing is spiritual gin.

Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow.

Friendships begin with liking or gratitude- roots that can be pulled up.

Old men's eyes are like old men's memories; they are strongest for things a long way off.

For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.

Confound you handsome young fellows! You think of having it all your own way in the world. You don't understand women. They don't admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.

The nature o' things doesn't change, though it seems as if one's own life was nothing but change.

We judge other according to results; how else?--not knowing the process by which results are arrived at.

Leisure is gone,--gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.

It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

Primary (the LDS Church's Sunday school for children) is where you go to do with somebody else's mother the things you would do with your own mother if she weren't so busy teaching Primary.

Shall we, because we walk on our hind feet, assume to ourselves only the privilege of imperishability?

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

Affection is the broadest basis of a good life.

There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.

You must love your work and not always be looking over the edge of it wanting your play to begin.

News is often dispersed as thoughtlessly and effectively as that pollen which the bees carry off (having no idea how powdery they are) when they are buzzing in search of their particular nectar.

Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been.

to my thinking, it is more pitiable to bore than to be bored.

It is always chilling, in friendly intercourse, to say you have no opinion to give.

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinnertime.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

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.

The commonest man, who has his ounce of sense and feeling, is conscious of the difference between a lovely, delicate woman and a coarse one. Even a dog feels a difference in her presence.

Man may content himself with the applause of the world and the homage paid to his intellect, but woman's heart has holier idols.

One learns more from defeat than from victory.

We should not confuse information with knowledge.

Where is the Life we lost in living?

People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.

The great ages did not contain the best talent, they wasted less.

In a world of fugitives the one who stays home will seem to be running away

People find a way in which they can say something.

Dear Mother, I am getting on nicely in my work at the bank, and like it ... I want to find out something about the science of money while I am at it; it is an extraordinarily interesting subject.

The fool,fixed in his folly,may think He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.

Bad poets imitate, good poets steal.

There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair- Lean on a garden urn- Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.

All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment.

I've been born, and once is enough.

Past art is subject to change.

To approach the stranger is to invite the unexpected, release a new force, let the genie out of the bottle. It is to start a new train of events that is beyond your control.

And the end and the beginning were always there Before the beginning and after the end.

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.

The nightingales are singing near The Convent of the Sacred Heart, And sang within the bloody wood When Agamemnon cried aloud, And let their liquid siftings fall To stain the stiff dishonored shroud.

Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.

Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws? She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.