T.S. Eliot Quotes

The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice.

Your trouble's easy borne when everybody gives it a lift for you.

To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.

I don't want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

It's never too late to be who you were meant to be.

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant

He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel That questions the distempered part; Beneath the bleeding hands we feel The sharp compassion of the healer's art Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

I suspect that in our loathing of totalitarianism, there is infused a good deal of admiration for its efficiency.

Old men ought to be explorers.

Liberal education develops a sense of right, duty and honor; and more and more in the modern world, large business rests on rectitude and honor as well as on good judgment.

With a poem you can say 'I got my feeling into words for myself. I now have the equivalent in words for that much of what I have felt.'

It takes so many years to learn that one is dead.

What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

The efficient man is the man who thinks for himself.

You will find that you survive humiliation. And that's an experience of incalculable value.

Nature repairs her ravages,--repairs them with her sunshine and with human labor.

A woman's rank Lies in the fulness of her womanhood: Therein alone she is royal.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.

In high vengeance there is noble scorn.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

Dream dreams and write them aye, but live them first.

A good horse makes short miles.

A few hints as to the craft may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost, get writing!

Historical methodology, as I see it, is a product of common sense applied to circumstances.

Delay is the enemy of progress.

I recognize but one mental acquisition as a necessary part of the education of a lady or gentlemen, namely, an accurate and refined use of the mother tongue.

There is no mystery about successful business.... Exclusive attention to the person who is speaking to you.

The Library is the heart of the University.

It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good.

We must always take risks. That is our destiny.

When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.

As we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated of dead and living.

Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste and end by debauching it.

Words strain, crack, and sometime break, under the burden.

And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.

The destination cannot be described; / You will know very little until you get there; / You will journey blind.

A thousand policemen directing traffic cannot tell you why you come or where you go.

There is no method but to be very intelligent.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.

Shareholders have the right and obligation to set the parameters of corporate behavior within which management pursues profit.

The darkest night that ever fell upon the earth never hid the light, never put out the stars. It only made the stars more keenly, kindly glancing, as if in protest against the darkness.

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.