All cases are unique, and very similar to others.
--T.S. Eliot
Ambition fortifies the will of man to become ruler over other men: it operates with deception, cajolery, and violence, it is the action of impurity upon impurity.
--T.S. Eliot
And the wind shall say: 'Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.'
--T.S. Eliot
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
Atheism is often merely a variety of Christianity.
--T.S. Eliot
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.
--T.S. Eliot
Birth, and copulation, and death. That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks.
--T.S. Eliot
Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmen.
--T.S. Eliot
Disillusion can become itself an illusion
If we rest in it.
--T.S. Eliot
Every moment is a fresh beginning.
--T.S. Eliot
For last year's words belong to last year's language. And next year's words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning.
--T.S. Eliot
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
--T.S. Eliot
Half of the harm that is done in the world is due to people who want to feel important.
--T.S. Eliot
Hold tight, hold tight, we must insist that the world is what we have always taken it to be.
--T.S. Eliot
Human kind cannot bear very much reality.
--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 don't belong to any generation.
--T.S. Eliot
I had seen birth and death
But had thought they were different.
--T.S. Eliot
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
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
In the case of many poets, the most important thing for them to do is to write as little as possible.
--T.S. Eliot
It is certain that a book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.
--T.S. Eliot
It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good.
--T.S. Eliot
It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous. Resign yourself to be the fool you are.
--T.S. Eliot
Men tighten the knot of confusion
Into perfect misunderstanding.
--T.S. Eliot
Neither way is better.
Both ways are necessary. It is also necessary
To make a choice between them.
--T.S. Eliot
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
Only by acceptance of the past will you alter its meaning.
--T.S. Eliot
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
--T.S. Eliot
Our age is an age of moderate virtue
And moderate vice.
--T.S. Eliot
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen.
--T.S. Eliot
Saints are not made by accident.
--T.S. Eliot
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
--T.S. Eliot
Success is relative; it is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.
--T.S. Eliot
The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called 'the permanent things'-the norms of human action.
--Russell Kirk
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
--T.S. Eliot
The circle of our understanding
Is a very restricted area.
--T.S. Eliot
The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.
--T.S. Eliot
The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.
--T.S. Eliot
The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a skeptic or an unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination to think anything out to a conclusion.
--T.S. Eliot
The man who returns will have to meet
The boy who left.
--T.S. Eliot
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.
--T.S. Eliot
There is another way, if you have the courage.
--T.S. Eliot
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
--T.S. Eliot
Those you say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste and end by debauching it.
--T.S. Eliot
We had the experience but missed the meaning.
--T.S. Eliot
We must always take risks. That is our destiny.
--T.S. Eliot
What is hell? 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.
--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 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?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries.
--T.S. Eliot
You are the music while the music lasts.
--T.S. Eliot
You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it.
--T.S. Eliot
You will find that you survive humiliation
And that's an experience of incalculable value.
--T.S. Eliot
Found 53 occurence(s) in 52,450 quotation(s).