T.S. Eliot Quotes

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offense. ... Everyone who contributes to the 'too much' of literature is doing grave social injury.

... one always believes one's own town to be more stupid than any other.

You know I have duties──we both have duties──before which feeling must be sacrificed.

I shall do everything it becomes me to do.

but very little achievement is required in order to pity another man's shortcomings.

I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.

The first sense of mutual love excludes other feelings; it will have the soul all to itself.

Miserliness is a capital quality to run in families; it's the safe side for madness to dip on.

It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and sorrow.

I am open to conviction on all points except dinner and debts. I hold that the one must be eaten and the other paid.

I easily sink into mere absorption of what other minds have done, and should like a whole life for that alone.

Alas! the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money obligation and selfish respects.

A bachelor's children are always young: they're immortal children - always lisping, waddling, helpless, and with a chance of turning out good.

The sweetest of all success is that which one wins by hard exertion.

in certain crises direct expression of sympathy is the least possible to those who most feel sympathy.

Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.

Try to take hold of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision.

Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say

Surely there was something taught her by this experience of great need; and she must be learning a secret of human tenderness and long-suffering, that the less erring could hardly know?

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves

In poor Rosamond's mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.

Life is like our game at whist ... I don't enjoy the game much, but I like to play my cards well, and see what will be the end of it.

History, we know, is apt to repeat itself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume.

Satan was a blunderer ... who made a stupendous failure. If he had succeeded, we should all have been worshipping him, and his portrait would have been more flattering.

The light can be a curtain as well as the darkness.

The strength of the donkey mind lies in adopting a course inversely as the arguments urged, which, well considered, requires as great a mental force as the direct sequence.

With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader.

The best happiness will be to escape the worst misery.

Where Jack isn't safe, Tom's in danger.

One of the tortures of jealousy is, that it can never turn away its eyes from the thing that pains it.

I take a dose of mathematics every day to prevent my brain from becoming quite soft.

Uncomfortable thoughts must be got rid of by good intentions for the future.

Better a wrong will than a wavering; better a steadfast enemy than an uncertain friend; better a false belief than no belief at all.

The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.

Hurt, he'll never be hurt--he's made to hurt other people.

If I got places, sir, it was because I made myself fit for 'em. If you want to slip into a round hole, you must first make a ball of yourself; that's where it is.

I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.

We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.

I protest against any absolute conclusion.

If a man goes a little too far along a new road, it is usually himself that he harms more than any one else.

It's well known there's always two sides, if no more.

It’s rather a strong check to one’s self-complacency to find how much of one’s right doing depends on not being in want of money.

What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?' said Sir James. 'He has one foot in the grave.' 'He means to draw it out again, I suppose.

It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive - when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.

A child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts." —WORDSWORTH.

A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.

It's but little good you'll do a-watering the last year's crops

Life's a vast sea That does its mighty errand without fail, Painting in unchanged strength though waves are changing.

But is it what we love, or how we love, That makes true good?