T.S. Eliot Quotes

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I have a conviction that a few weeks spent in a well organized summer camp may be of more value educationally than a whole year of formal school work.

What is true, is true only for one time and only for one place.

Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.

A wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude toward God.

A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous. Resign yourself to be the fool you are... ...We must always take risks. That is our destiny.

Global warming threatens our health, our economy, our natural resources, and our children's future. It is clear we must act.

How will you find good? It is not a thing of choice; it is a river that flows from the foot of the Invisible Throne and flows by the path of obedience.

It is a wonderful subduer, this need of love-this hunger of the heart-as peremptory as that other hunger by which Nature forces us to submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world.

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God. . . . So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.

Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity.

Disillusion can become itself an illusion If we rest in it.

Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn't do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.

No man can be wise on an empty stomach.

Messenger of sympathy and love, Servant of parted friends, Consoler of the lonely, Bond of the scattered family, Enlarger of the common life.

Every moment is a new and shocking transvaluation of all we have ever been.

Teach us to care and not to care

The end is where we start from.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

Cling, swing, Spring, sing, Swing up into the apple tree.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.

I like not only to be loved, but to be told that I am loved; the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave.

Poetry is not an assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.

What we know of other people's only our memory of the moments during which we knew them.

It is worth while dying, to find out what life is.

A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments.

In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession.

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.

You may try — but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

No place of grace for those who avoid the Face. No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the Voice.

It is good to be helpful and kindly, but don't give yourself to be melted into candle grease for the benefit of the tallow trade.

We do not pass twice through the same door Or return to the door through which we did not pass.

It is always good to know, if only in passing, charming human beings. It refreshes one like flowers and woods and clear brooks.

I shall not want Honor in Heaven For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney And have talk with Coriolanus And other heroes of that kidney.

People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.