Quotes By T. S. Eliot

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

In my beginning is my end.

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.

Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?

My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.

If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it."

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

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?

It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.

O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm, retreating to the corner of arm and knee, eager to be reassured, taking pleasure in the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

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

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.

All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords.

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.

You are the music while the music lasts.

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.

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.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?

The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.