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T. S. Eliot Quotes - Page 6

All Quotes Adventure Age Aging Ambition Appreciation Art Atheism Attitude Awareness Birth Children Choices Christianity Church Coffee Communication Confusion Country Creation Criticism Culture Dance Dancing Darkness Death Desire Destiny Discipline Dying Evil Experience Faith Fear Feelings Fighting Food Funny Genius Giving Graduation Greatness Heart History Home Hope House Humanity Humility Ignorance Imagination Inspiration Inspirational Inspiring Journey Judging Justice Knowledge Labor Language Laughter Life Literature Loneliness Love Lying Meditation Memories Morning Motivational Mountain Music New Beginnings Pain Passion Past Peace Personality Philosophy Poetry Progress Purpose Rain Reading Reality Religion Risk Running Silence Simplicity Singing Soul Spring Struggle Success Suffering Talent Tea Time Tradition Understanding Vision Waiting War Winter Work Writing

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.

Faith, Mystery, Happened

T.S. Eliot (2009). “Collected Poems 1909-1962”, p.148, Faber & Faber

There is no such thing as a lost cause, because there is no such thing as a gained cause

Causes, Lost, Lost Cause

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

We fight to keep something alive rather than in the expectation that anything will triumph.

Fighting, Expectations, Triumph

Between the desire And the spasm, Between the potency And the existence, Between the essence And the descent, Falls the Shadow.

Fall, Essence, Shadow

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

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.

Passion, Emotional, Justice

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

Reading, Winter, Night

The Waste Land l. 17 (1922)

We must always take risks. That is our destiny.

Destiny, Risk, Our Destiny

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

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

Inspirational, Funny, Graduation

Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.

Love, Memories, Garden

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

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

Music, Thyme, Lasts

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

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

Death, Poetry, Religion

"The Hollow Men" l. 95 (1925)

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.

Organization, Humanity, Progress

T. S. Eliot (2014). “Christianity and Culture”, p.56, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Neither way is better. / Both ways are necessary. / It is also necessary / To make a choice between them.

Choices, Way

T.S. Eliot (2011). “The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot”, p.405, Faber & Faber

The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o'clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps.

Lonely, Horse, Winter

Prufrock (1917) "Preludes"

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.

Believe, Successful, Reality

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.

Death, Dance, Recovery

Four Quartets "Little Gidding" pt. 5 (1942)

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

Hope, Meditation, Waiting

1940 Four Quartets,'East Coker', pt.1.

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

World, Patterns, Complicated

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

It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored in climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both.

Nature, Struggle, Men

The naming of cats is a difficult matter. It isn't just one of your holiday games. You may think at first I'm mad as a hatter. When I tell you a cat must have three different names.

Holiday, Cat, Thinking

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats "The Naming of Cats" l. 1 (1939)

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.

Truth, Character, Facts

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

Basketball, Want, Individual Talent

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

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

Struggle, Way, Where You Are

Four Quartets "East Coker" pt. 3 (1940)

The end is where we start from.

New Beginnings, Tunnels, New Start

Four Quartets "Little Gidding" pt. 5 (1942)

Disillusion can become itself an illusion If we rest in it.

Illusion, Disillusionment, Disillusion

T.S. Eliot (2011). “The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot”, p.403, Faber & Faber

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