T.S. Eliot Quotes

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

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

Decide on what you think is right, and stick to it.

Skepticism is an important historical tool. It is the starting point of all revision of hitherto accepted history.

There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a sort of baptism and consecration.

It is as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog.

The stars are golden fruit upon a tree all out of reach.

But certain winds will make men's temper bad.

Signs are taken for wonders. / 'We would see a sign!' / The word within a word, unable to speak a word, / Swaddled with darkness.

I believe in an evolving Constitution. A flexible Constitution leaves room for us to consider not merely how the world once was, but how it ought to be.

So I find words I never thought to speak In streets I never thought I should revisit When I left my body on a distant shore.

I do not photograph for ulterior purposes. I photograph for the thing itself - for the photograph - without consideration of how it may be used.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Light Light The visible reminder of Invisible Light.

Between the desire And the spasm, Between the potency And the existence, Between the essence And the descent, Falls the Shadow.

Kisses honeyed by oblivion.

In life there is not time to grieve long.

The loss of religious faith among the most civilized portion of the race is a step from childishness toward maturity.

The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.

In some small field each child should attain, within the limited range of its experience and observation, the power to draw a justly limited inference from observed facts.

There are glances of hatred that stab, and raise no cry of murder.

But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire; the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love.

With cats, some say, one rule is true: Don't speak till you are spoken to.

You know that it is only through work that you can achieve anything, either in college or in the world

Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison.

If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable

Men dislike being awakened from their death in life.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.

People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

In every parting there is an image of death.

I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

Human kind cannot bear much reality.

It is not enough to understand what we ought to be, unless we know what we are; and we do not understand what we are, unless we know what we ought to be.

Taking the question in general, I should say, in the case of many poets, that the most important thing for them to do ... is to write as little as possible

America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy.

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.