Quotes By T. S. Eliot

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

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.

Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.

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.

Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

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

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

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.

Home is where one starts from.

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

Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.

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

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

This love is silent.

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.

Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.

It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.

The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself.

And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.

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.

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

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

April is the cruellest month.