T. S. Eliot famous quotes

The True Church can never fail. For it is based upon a rock.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Rocks #Church #Failing

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Inspirational #Life #Motivational

Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?
-- T. S. Eliot

#Knowledge #Technology #Information

Survival is your strength not your shame.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Survival #Shame

At the still point, there the dance is.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Beautiful #Scene #Stills

If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
-- T. S. Eliot

#Hard Times #Entrepreneur #Challenges

Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Negative #Nasty

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

#Inspirational #Funny #Life

For most of us, there is only the unattended Moment, the moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts
-- T. S. Eliot

#Winter #Thyme #Waterfalls

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

#Inspirational #Mean #People

not fare well, but fare forward
-- T. S. Eliot

#Wells

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

#Faith #Inspiration #Voice

Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Inspirational #Time #Decision

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is a life.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Life #Men #Might

The greatest proof of Christianity for others is not how far a man can logically analyze his reasons for believing, but how far in practice he will stake his life on his belief.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Believe #Men #Practice

Teach us to care and not to care
-- T. S. Eliot

#Care #Teach

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Games #Careers #May

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

#Mom #Mother #Baby

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Funny #Humorous #Way

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

#Blood #Theatre #Producers

You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends, And how, how rare and strange it is, to find In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends, (For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? you are not blind! How keen you are!) To find a friend who has these qualities, Who has, and gives Those qualities upon which friendship lives. How much it means that I say this to you- Without these friendships-life, what cauchemar!
-- T. S. Eliot

#Mean #Odds #Giving

People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Exercise #People #Influence

And through the spaces of the dark Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Memories #Dark #Space

If we all were judged according to the consequences Of all our words and deeds, beyond the intention And beyond our limited understanding Of ourselves and others, we should all be condemned.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Understanding #Our Words #Deeds

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Respect #Library #Literature

There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Real #Views #Point Of View

One starts an action simply because one must do something.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Action

And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you I will show you fear in a handful of dust
-- T. S. Eliot

#Morning #Fear #Dust

These fragments I have shored against my ruins
-- T. S. Eliot

#Age #Ruins #Nostalgia

Do I dare disturb the universe?
-- T. S. Eliot

#Clever #Dare #Universe

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Inspirational #Music #Fear

Success is relative. It is what we make of the mess we have made of things.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Success #Failure #Entrepreneur

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Work #Poetry #Trying

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Immature #Different #Stealing

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly But merely vans to beat the air The air which is now thoroughly small and dry Smaller and dryer than the will Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still
-- T. S. Eliot

#Air #Wings #Dry

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.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Body #Speak #Should

Between the desire And the spasm, Between the potency And the existence, Between the essence And the descent, Falls the Shadow.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Fall #Essence #Shadow

The journey, Not the destination matters...
-- T. S. Eliot

#Journey #Matter #Destination

I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Men #Thinking #Rats

In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Running #Opposites #Independence

No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest- for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Aptitude #Study #Educated

Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow
-- T. S. Eliot

#Fall #Reality #Ideas

Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it
-- T. S. Eliot

#Letting Go #Time #Acceptance

If you start with a bang, you won't end with a whimper.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Writing #Bangs #Ends

I learn a great deal by merely observing you, and letting you talk as long as you please, and taking note of what you do not say.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Long #Notes #Please

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Coffee #Hours #Sunlight

Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Evil #People #Done

Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Love #Life #Romantic

Art serves us best precisely at that point where it can shift our sense of what is possible, when we know more than we knew before, when we feel we have - by some manner of a leap - encountered the truth. That, by the logic of art, is always worth the pain.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Art #Pain #Logic

Bad poets imitate, good poets steal.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Stealing #Poet

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

#Patterns #World #Complicated

In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
-- T. S. Eliot

#Singing #Moonlight #Grass

Old men ought to be explorers.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Men #Old Man #Explorers

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

#Love #Struggle #Strange

In the mountains, there you feel free.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Mountain #Feels

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Kindness #Reality #Atheism

O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Heart #Men #Hype

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Art #Writing #Poetry

Disillusion can become itself an illusion If we rest in it.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Illusion #Disillusionment #Disillusion

When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom, the work is likely to sprawl.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Ideas #Imagination #Produce

The end is where we start from.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Ends

Never commit yourself to a cheese without having first examined it.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Firsts #Cheese #Commit

It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London.
-- T. S. Eliot

#New York #Self #Boston

The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Temptation #Deeds #Lasts

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Light #Dancing #Generosity

And all shall be well and/ All manner of thing shall be well/ By the purification of the motive/ In the ground of our beseeching
-- T. S. Eliot

#Purification #Motive #Wells

You are the music while the music lasts.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Music #Dope #Lasts

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

#Giving #Political #Want

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Waiting #Not Ready #Ready

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Art #Artist #Poet

Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Care #Praying #Hours

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Art #Sacrifice #Self

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Death #Different #Birth

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Witty #Humorous #Writing

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

#Order #Way

A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Art #Thinking #Play

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

#Silence #Enough #Found

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

#Religion #Littles #Too Much

My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Trouble #Curtains

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Poetry #Crafts #Conscious

In my beginning is my end.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Ends

We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Relationship #Memories #People

Turn things you've always wanted to do, into things you've done
-- T. S. Eliot

#Done #Wanted #Turns

He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it
-- T. S. Eliot

#Ideas #Mind #Fine

The only hope, or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre - To be redeemed from fire by fire.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Hope #Lying #Fire

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Peace #Poultry #Foxes

In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Talking #Rooms #Culture

Think not forever of yourselves, O Chiefs, nor of your own generation. Think of continuing generations of our families, think of our grandchildren and of those yet unborn, whose faces are coming from beneath the ground.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Peace #Thinking #Grandchildren

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

#Time #People #Patterns

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Inspirational #Life #Beautiful

One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Art #Unique #Feelings

time past and time future what might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Time #Past #Might

The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Passion #Majority #Humans

Light Light The visible reminder of Invisible Light.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Light #Invisible #Reminders

The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man
-- T. S. Eliot

#Hope #Men #Library

Now that lilacs are in bloom She has a bowl of lilacs in her room And twists one in her fingers while she talks. "Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know What life is, you who hold it in your hands"; (slowly twisting the lilac stalks) "You let it flow from you, you let it flow, And youth is cruel, and has no remorse And smiles at situations which it cannot see." I smile, of course, And go on drinking tea.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Drinking #Hands #Tea

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Appreciation #Art #Poet

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

#Suffering #Fancy #Gentle

The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Blood #Literature #Ink

It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape, not from our own time - for we are bound by that - but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.
-- T. S. Eliot

#Education #Emotional #Intelligence