T.S Eliot Quotes - Page 3

Time and the bell have buried the day,The black cloud carries the sun away.Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematisStray down, bend to us; tendril and sprayClutch and cling? ChillFingers of yew be curledDown on us? After the kingfisher's wingHas answered light to light, and is silent, the light is stillAt the still point of the turning world.
T.S Eliot
I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the metier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop this consciousness throughout his career. What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
T.S Eliot
You are not here to verify,instruct yourself, or inform curiosityor carry report. You are here to kneelwhere prayer has been valid. And prayer is more than an order of words, the conscious occupation of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
T.S Eliot
For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice.
T.S Eliot
Because I came to seeThat I should never have been a first-rate potter.I didn't have it in me. It's strange, isn't it, That a man should have a consuming passion To do something for which he lacks the capacity? Could a man be said to have a vocation To be a second-rate potter? To be, at best,A competent copier, possessed by the cravingTo create, when one is wholly uncreative?I don't think so. For I came to see, That I had always known, at the secret moments,That I didn't have it in me. There are occasionsWhen I am transported- a different person,Transfigured in the vision of some marvellous creation,And I feel what the man must have felt when he made it.But nothing I made ever gave me that contentment-That state of utter exhaustion and peaceWhich comes in dying to give something life...
T.S Eliot
We understand the ordinary business of living, We know how to work the machine
T.S Eliot
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
T.S Eliot
Two people who know they do not understand each other, breeding children whom they do not understand and who will never understand them.
T.S Eliot
A christian martyrdom is never an accident, for Saints are not made by accident.
T.S Eliot
music heard so deeplyThat it is not heard at all, butyou are the musicWhile the music lasts.
T.S Eliot
How wild it was, to let it be.
T.S Eliot
I don't know much about gods, but I think the river is a strong, brown god
T.S Eliot
It seems that one ought to read in two ways: 1) because of a particular and personal interest, which makes the thing one's own, regardless of what other people think of the book 2) to a certain extent, because it is something one 'ought to have read' but one must be quite clear this why one is reading.
T.S Eliot
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
T.S Eliot
Under the penitential gatesSustained by staring SeraphimWhere the souls of the devoutBurn invisible and dim.
T.S Eliot
We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.
T.S Eliot
Our second danger is to associate tradition with the immovable; to think of it as something hostile to all change; to aim to return to some previous condition which we imagine as having been capable of preservation in perpetuity, instead of aiming to stimulate the life which produced that condition in its time. . . . a tradition without intelligence is not worth having . . .
T.S Eliot
If time and space, as sages say,Are things which cannot be,The sun which does not feel decayNo greater is than we.So why, Love, should we ever prayTo live a century?The butterfly that lives a dayHas lived eternity.
T.S Eliot
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse
T.S Eliot
But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.
T.S Eliot
And right action is freedom from past and future also.For most of us, this is the aim never to be realized. Who are only undefeated because we have gone on trying. "The Dry Salvages
T.S Eliot
Before a Cat will condescendTo treat you as a trusted friend,Some little token of esteemIs needed, like a dish of cream;And you might now and then supplySome caviare, or Strassburg Pie,Some potted grouse, or salmon paste —He's sure to have his personal taste.(I know a Cat, who makes a habitOf eating nothing else but rabbit,And when he's finished, licks his pawsSo's not to waste the onion sauce.)A Cat's entitled to expectThese evidences of respect.And so in time you reach your aim,And finally call him by his name.
T.S Eliot
Unreal friendship may turn to real But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended
T.S Eliot
Do not let me hearOf the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
T.S Eliot
The backward look behind the assuranceOf recorded history, the backward half-lookOver the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.
T.S Eliot
Do I dare Disturb the universe?
T.S Eliot
The dripping blood our only drink,The bloody flesh our only food:In spite of which we like to thinkThat we are sound, substantial flesh and blood--Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
T.S Eliot
Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance
T.S Eliot
You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
T.S Eliot
You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
T.S Eliot
Not the intense momentIsolated, with no before and after,But a lifetime burning in every moment.
T.S Eliot
There will be time, there will be timeTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;There will be time to murder and create,And time for all the works and days of handsThat lift and drop a question on your plate;Time for you and time for me,And time yet for a hundred indecisions,And for a hundred visions and revisions,Before the taking of a toast and tea.
T.S Eliot
We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
T.S Eliot
Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.
T.S Eliot
Destiny waits in the hand of god, shaping the still unshapen..
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
A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.
T.S Eliot
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T.S Eliot
Poetry, if it is not to be a lifeless repetition of forms, must be constantly exploring "the frontiers of the spirit." But these frontiers are not like the surveys of geographical explorers, conquered once for all and settled. The frontiers of the spirit are more like the jungle which, unless continuously kept under control, is always ready to encroach and eventually obliterate the cultivated area.
T.S Eliot
Think neither fear nor courage saves us.Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
T.S Eliot
As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill.
T.S Eliot
April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory and desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain.Winter kept us warm, coveringEarth in forgetful snow, feedingA little life with dried tubers.Summer surprised us, coming over the StarnbergerseeWith a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's,My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,And I was frightened. He said, Marie,Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.In the mountains, there you feel free.I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
T.S Eliot
The Pekes and the Pollicles, everyone knows, Are proud and implacable, passionate foes;It is always the same, wherever one goes.And the Pugs and the Poms, although most people saythat they do not like fighting, will often displayEvery symptom of wanting to join in the fray.And theyBark bark bark bark bark barkUntil you can hear them all over the park.
T.S Eliot
Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.
T.S Eliot
Till Human voices wake us, and we drown.
T.S Eliot
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.
T.S Eliot
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
T.S Eliot
LightLightThe visible reminder of Invisible Light.
T.S Eliot
You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;tThey called me the hyacinth girl.'t —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,t Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could nott Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neithert Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,t Looking into the heart of light, the silence.t Od' und leer das Meer.
T.S Eliot
You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,And how, how rare and strange it is, to findIn a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,(For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? you are not blind! How keen you are!)To find a friend who has these qualities,Who has, and givesThose qualities upon which friendship lives.How much it means that I say this to you-Without these friendships-life, what cauchemar!
T.S Eliot
My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.t 'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.t 'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?t 'I never know what you are thinking. Think.
T.S Eliot
So I find words I never thought to speakIn streets I never thought I should revisitWhen I left my body on a distant shore.
T.S Eliot
Who is the third who walks always beside you?When I count, there are only you and I togetherBut when I look ahead up the white roadThere is always another one walking beside youGliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hoodedI do not know whether a man or a woman-But who is that on the other side of you?
T.S Eliot
And would it have been worth it, after all,Would it have been worth while,After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor - And this, and so much more? -
T.S Eliot
Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time futureAnd time future contained in time past.
T.S Eliot
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.
T.S Eliot
Time for you and time for me,tAnd time yet for a hundred indecisions,tAnd for a hundred visions and revisions,tBefore the taking of a toast and tea.
T.S Eliot
April is the cruelest month, breedinglilacs out of the dead land, mixingmemory and desire, stirringdull roots with spring rain.
T.S Eliot
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T.S Eliot
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T.S Eliot