T. S. Eliot Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

• Time present and time past / are both perhaps present in time future.

  T. S. Eliot

  Past, Times Past, Quartets

  Four Quartets "Burnt Norton" pt. 1 (1936)

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• As we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated of dead and living.

  T. S. Eliot

  World, Patterns, Complicated

  Four Quartets "East Coker" pt. 5 (1940)

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• 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, Stealing Things

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• At the still point, there the dance is.

  T. S. Eliot

  Beautiful, Dance, Scene

  'Four Quartets' 'Burnt Norton' (1936) pt. 2

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• Not less of love, but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the Future as well as the past.

  T. S. Eliot

  Love, Past, Desire

  1942 Four Quartets,'Little Gidding', pt.3.

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• You have to risk going too far to discover just how far you can really go.

  T. S. Eliot

  Inspiring, Courage, Risk

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• 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.

  T. S. Eliot

  Enough, Ought, Knows

  T.S. Eliot (1950). “Selected Essays”

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• To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now.

  T. S. Eliot

  Believe, Successful, Reality

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• One thing you cannot know: The sudden extinction of every alternative, The unexpected crash of the iron cataract. You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it. You only know what it is not to hope: You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless Unrecognized by other men, though sometimes by each other.

  T. S. Eliot

  Hope, Taken, Men

  T.S. Eliot (2011). “The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot”, p.290, Faber & Faber

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• 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

  Love, Inspirational, Life

  "Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley". Book by T. S. Eliot, ch. 1, Columbia University Press (quoting Doctoral dissertation in philosophy; submitted to Harvard in 1916), 1964.

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• If you want it you must obtain it by great labor.

  T. S. Eliot

  Basketball, Want, Individual Talent

  The Sacred Wood "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1920)

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• This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

  T. S. Eliot

  Death, Poetry, Religion

  "The Hollow Men" l. 95 (1925)

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• Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter.

  T. S. Eliot

  Love, Life, Romantic

  1940 Four Quartets,'East Coker', pt.5.

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• In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away.

  T. S. Eliot

  Running, Opposites, Independence

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “The Complete Plays of T. S. Eliot”, p.111, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment.

  T. S. Eliot

  Intense Moments, Burning, Before And After

  Four Quartets "East Coker" pt. 5 (1940)

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• Home is where one starts from.

  T. S. Eliot

  Educational, Home, Sweet Home

  Four Quartets "East Coker" pt. 5 (1940)

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• We can at least try to understand our own motives, passions, and prejudices, so as to be conscious of what we are doing when we apeal to those of others. This is very difficult, because our own prejudice and emotional bias always seems to us so rational.

  T. S. Eliot

  Passion, Emotional, Justice

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• 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

  T.S. Eliot (2015). “The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems”, p.165, Faber & Faber

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• You can evade life, but you can not evade Death.

  T. S. Eliot

  Life, Life Death, Can Not

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• Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
  Into different lives, or into any future;
  You are not the same people who left that station
  Or who will arrive at any terminus,
  While the narrowing rails slide together behind you.

  T. S. Eliot

  Time, Past, Escaping

  T.S. Eliot (2011). “The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot”, p.170, Faber & Faber

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• What is this self-inside us, this silent observer, severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us, and urge us onto futile activity, and in the end, judge us still more severely for the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?

  T. S. Eliot

  Errors, Self, Judging

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• We must always take risks. That is our destiny.

  T. S. Eliot

  Destiny, Risk, Our Destiny

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950”, p.376, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts.

  T. S. Eliot

  Music, Thyme, Lasts

  Four Quartets "The Dry Salvages" pt. 5 (1941)

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• Poetry is not an assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.

  T. S. Eliot

  Real, Poetry Is, Assertion

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• 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

  T.S. Eliot (2011). “The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot”, p.75, Faber & Faber

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