T. S. Eliot Quotes - Page 14

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• Dear Mother, I am getting on nicely in my work at the bank, and like it ... I want to find out something about the science of money while I am at it; it is an extraordinarily interesting subject.

  T. S. Eliot

  Mother, Interesting, Want

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• The dove descending breaks the air With flame of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error. The only hope, or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre- To be redeemed from fire by fire. Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove. We only live, only suspire Consumed by either fire or fire.

  T. S. Eliot

  Lying, Love Is, Fire

  Four Quartets "Little Gidding" pt. 4 (1942)

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• As a rule, with me an unfinished [idea] is a thing that might as well be rubbed out. It's better, if there's something good in it that I might make use of elsewhere, to leave it at the back of my mind than on paper in a drawer. If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing but if it's in the memory it becomes transformed into something else.

  T. S. Eliot

  Memories, Ideas, Mind

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• Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

  T. S. Eliot

  Helping, Language, Should

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• Cold Mountain Buddhas Han Shan Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness be dancing. Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning. The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry, The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony Of death and birth.

  T. S. Eliot

  Death, Running, Laughter

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• The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.

  T. S. Eliot

  Funeral, Done, Tickets

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• When comparing works of art, it is important that the art itself, and not the artists, be considered.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Important, Compare

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• There are three conditions which often look alike Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference, ... .

  T. S. Eliot

  Attachment, Self, Three

  T.S. Eliot (2009). “Collected Poems 1909-1962”, p.180, Faber & Faber

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• War among men defiles this world.

  T. S. Eliot

  War, Men, World

  T.S. Eliot (2011). “The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot”, p.245, Faber & Faber

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• It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.

  T. S. Eliot

  Wise, Rebellion, Know How

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• 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

  Time, Believe, Thinking

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
  I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.

  T. S. Eliot

  Tired, Dying, Mortality

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Poetry, Feelings

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry”, p.220, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.

  T. S. Eliot

  Mean, Poetry, May

  T. S. Eliot (1986). “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England”, p.122, Harvard University Press

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• Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall My buried life, and Paris in the spring, I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world To be wonderful and youthful afterall

  T. S. Eliot

  Spring, Sunset, Paris

  T.S. Eliot (2009). “Collected Poems 1909-1962”, p.13, Faber & Faber

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• There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience.

  T. S. Eliot

  Experience, Quartets, Seems

  1940 Four Quartets,'East Coker', pt.2.

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• The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.

  T. S. Eliot

  Hints, Half, Quartets

  1941 Four Quartets,'The Dry Salvages', pt.5.

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• I was too slow a mover to be a boxer. It was much easier to be a poet.

  T. S. Eliot

  Boxers, Poet, Easier

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• Birth, and copulation, and death; that's all the facts when you come to brass tacks.

  T. S. Eliot

  Life, Death, Dying

  Sweeney Agonistes (1932)

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• Death has a hundred hands and walks by a thousand ways.

  T. S. Eliot

  Death, Hands, Way

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Murder in the Cathedral”, p.44, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors' victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.

  T. S. Eliot

  Fighting, Expectations, Victory

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Essays Ancient and Modern”, p.59, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• We have all our private terrors, our particular shadows, our secret fears. We are afraid in a fear which we cannot face, which none understands, and our hearts are torn from us, our brains unskinned like the layers of an onion, ourselves the last.

  T. S. Eliot

  Heart, Secret, Brain

  T.S. Eliot (2011). “The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot”, p.226, Faber & Faber

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• It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the 'dear deceit' of beauty.

  T. S. Eliot

  Beauty, Eye, Deceit

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• O father, father
  Gone from us, lost to us,
  The church lies bereft,
  Alone,
  Desecrated, desolated.
  And the heathen shall build
  On the ruins
  Their world without God.
  I see it.
  I see it.

  T. S. Eliot

  Lying, Father, Church

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950”, p.228, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius.

  T. S. Eliot

  Race, Creative, Mind

  T.S. Eliot (2010). “The Waste Land and Other Poems”, p.84, Broadview Press

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