T.S. Eliot Quotes

Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

All dash to and fro in motor cars. Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.

Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.

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.

The past and future / Are conquered, and reconciled.

The naming of cats is a difficult matter

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is incarnation. Here the impossible union of spheres of existence is actual. Here the past and future are conquered and reconciled.

Dayodhuam: I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.

Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.

Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.

A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought.

Those bitter sorrows of childhood!-- when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.

A Christian home! What a power it is to the child when he is far away in the cold, tempting world, and voices of sin are filling his ears, and his feet stand on slippery places.

In the modern world the intelligence of public opinion is the one indispensable condition for social progress.

I kind of got inspired by [William] Wordsworth and [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge - I went the old traditional way of finding inspiration, I guess.

Veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls.

Trouble's made us kin.

Genius ... is necessarily intolerant of fetters.

"Abroad," that large home of ruined reputations.

We are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering.

there are two ways of speaking an audience will always like: one is, to tell them what they don't understand; and the other is, to tell them what they're used to.

We are led on, like little children, by a way we know not.

I flutter all ways, and fly in none.

Joy and sorrow are both my perpetual companions, but the joy is called Past and the sorrow Present.

If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.

Starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags , we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.

How oft review; each finding, like a friend, Something to blame, and something to commend.

There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room.

If you could make a pudding wi' thinking o' the batter, it 'ud be easy getting dinner.

As leopard feels at home with leopard.

Some people are born to make life pretty, and others to grumble that it is not pretty enough.

... the fallibility of human brains is in nothing more obvious than in proof reading.

To judge wisely, we must know how things appear to the unwise.

... it is seldom a medical man has true religious views--there is too much pride of intellect.

Confidence is a resolute state of mind by which you believe nothing is impossible.

If you really want to break from the pack, you have to risk being perceived to be as eccentric as these people. You have to think exceptionally-a LOT!

It is the intelligent and highly educated that agonize over their limitations.

Sand. Everywhere. In the bed, in the shower, all over the floor. Grrrrr.

That meddling in other people's affairs...formerly conducted by the most discreet intrigue is now openly advocated under the name of intervention.

If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.

The work of creation is never without travail.

Because I know that time is always time and place is always place and only place. And what is actual is actual only for one time. And only for one place. I rejoice that things are as they are.

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless. The houses are all gone under the sea. The dancers are all gone under the hill.

It's harder to confess the sin that no one believes in Than the crime that everyone can appreciate. For the crime is in relation to the law And the sin is in relation to the sinner.

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices in the lost lilac and the lost sea voices and the weak spirit quickens to rebel for the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell quickens to recover.

I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;Her coat is one of the tabby kind,with tiger stripes and lepard spots.

People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.

She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.

Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly -- something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.

When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.