You are the music while the music lasts.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Music
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Reality, Present
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Courage
The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Right, Goodness, Deeds, Good Deeds
If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Power
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Language, Poetry
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Trying
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
Topics: Aging, Age
So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Evil, Thought, Reason
When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Literature, Books
April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Seasons, Spring, Rain
We must believe that “emotion recollected in tranquility” is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquility. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not “recollected” and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is “tranquil” only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Poetry
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those we have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Art, Poets, Poetry
In my end is my beginning.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Beginning, Dying, Death, Ending
I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Dancing, Dance
What is true, is true only for one time and only for one place.
—T. S. Eliot
Birth, copulation and death. That’s all the facts when you come to the brass tacks.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Living, Life
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory out of desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in a forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Seasons
It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored in climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Acceptance, Happiness
There are flood and drought over the eyes and in the mouth, dead water and dead sand contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil gapes at the vanity of toil, laughs without mirth. This is the death of the earth.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Food
To each individual the world will take on a different connotation of meaning-the important lies in the desire to search for an answer.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Knowledge
Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Humility
The young feel tired at the end of an action, the old at the beginning.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Youth, Time
We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now, by suffering. This is the easier victory.
—T. S. Eliot
Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Poetry, Poets
Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Liberty, Freedom
I suppose some editors are failed writers; but so are most writers.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing
Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Love, Romance
It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good.
—T. S. Eliot
When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Poetry, Poets
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Henry James American-born British Novelist
- Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor American-born British Politician
- Dorothy L. Sayers English Novelist, Playwright
- Robert Penn Warren American Novelist, Poet
- Bertrand A. Russell British Philosopher, Mathematician
- Rudyard Kipling British Children’s Books Writer
- W. H. Auden British-born American Poet
- Edith Sitwell British Poet
- William Butler Yeats Irish Poet
- Louis Leo Snyder American-born German Scholar
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