T.S. Eliot Quotes

Much of our waking experience is but a dream in the daylight.

Time present and time past / are both perhaps present in time future.

I've never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.

Good poets borrow, great poets steal

The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us... and we drown.

Hopes have precarious life. They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off In vigorous growth and turned to rottenness.

Sympathetic people often don't communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.

We must not inquire too curiously into motives. they are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.

All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgments of probabilities, and not on certainties.

Truth and right are above utility in all realms of thought and action.

A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

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

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.

No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.

What is opportunity to the man who can't use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.

Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.

There is so much to read and the days are so short! I get more hungry for knowledge every day, and less able to satisfy my hunger.

An ingenious web of probabilities is the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.

Genius is the capacity for receiving and improving by discipline.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word / Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.

Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove.

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

I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare.

There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.

The United States has lost her unique position as a leader in the progress of civilization and has taken up her place simply as one of the grasping and selfish nations of the present day.

Photography is a strong tool, a propaganda device, and a weapon for the defense of the environment...and therefore for the fostering of a healthy human race and even very likely for its survival.

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.

Blameless people are always the most exasperating.

Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

All cases are unique and very similar to others.

Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

There's folks 'ud stand on their heads and then say the fault was i' their boots.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.

Too small is our world to allow discrimination, bigotry and intolerance to thrive in any corner of it, let alone in the United States of America.

One could get a first-class education from a shelf of books five feet long.

The freedom of thought and expression is one of the most sacred rights in this country.

The human soul is hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality.

The role of art is not to express the personality but to overcome it.

Hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience ?in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

I am moved by fancies that are curled, around these images and cling, the notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.