T S Eliot
A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.
T S Eliot
Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.
T S Eliot
April is the cruellest month.
T S Eliot
Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.
T S Eliot
Business today consists in persuading crowds.
T S Eliot
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T S Eliot
Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.
T S Eliot
Home is where one starts from.
T S Eliot
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
T S Eliot
I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.
T S Eliot
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.
T S Eliot
I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.
T S Eliot
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
T S Eliot
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.
T S Eliot
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
T S Eliot
If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
T S Eliot
If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it."
T S Eliot
In my beginning is my end.
T S Eliot
It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.
T S Eliot
It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.
T S Eliot
It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.
T S Eliot
It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.
T S Eliot
Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.
T S Eliot
My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.
T S Eliot
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T S Eliot
Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.
T S Eliot
Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
T S Eliot
People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.
T S Eliot
Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.
T S Eliot
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
T S Eliot
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
T S Eliot
So the lover must struggle for words.
T S Eliot
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T S Eliot
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.
T S Eliot
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
T S Eliot
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.
T S Eliot
The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
T S Eliot
The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
T S Eliot
The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.
T S Eliot
The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.
T S Eliot
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
T S Eliot
The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself.
T S Eliot
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.
T S Eliot
There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.
T S Eliot
There is no method but to be very intelligent.
T S Eliot
There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.
T S Eliot
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
T S Eliot
This love is silent.
T S Eliot
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.
T S Eliot
We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
T S Eliot
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
T S Eliot
What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
T S Eliot
Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?
T S Eliot
Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T S Eliot
Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.
T S Eliot
You are the music while the music lasts.
T S Eliot