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T. S. Eliot Quotes - Page 9

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

Accident is design / And design is accident / In a cloud of unknowing.

Accident is design / And design is accident / In a cloud of unknowing.

Clouds, Design, Accidents

T. S. Eliot (2014). “The Family Reunion”, p.105, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice.

Inspirational, New Year, New Beginnings

T. S. Eliot (2014). “Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950”, p.150, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow

Winter, Snow, Covering

The Waste Land l. 5 (1922)

People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.

People, Events, Happened

T. S. Eliot (2014). “The Complete Plays of T. S. Eliot”, p.66, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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.

Stealing Things, Immature, Different

1920 The Sacred Wood,'Philip Massinger'.

Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake.

Culture, Sake, Aim

T. S. Eliot (2014). “Notes towards the Definition of Culture”, p.18, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The fool,fixed in his folly,may think He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

Life, Thinking, May

T.S. Eliot (2011). “The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot”, p.229, Faber & Faber

Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison.

Pain, Freedom, Liberty

T. S. Eliot (2014). “The Complete Plays of T. S. Eliot”, p.107, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult...The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning.

Order, Civilization, Language

"The Metaphysical Poets" (1921)

Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other Who think the same thoughts without need of speech

Thinking, Smell, Needs

T.S. Eliot (2015). “The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems”, p.219, Faber & Faber

You have to risk going too far to discover just how far you can really go.

Inspiring, Courage, Risk

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.

Art, Artist, Individual Talent

T.S. Eliot (2010). “The Waste Land and Other Poems”, p.85, Broadview Press

What profession is more trying than that of author? After you finish a piece of work it only seems good to you for a few weeks; or if it seems good at all you are convinced that it is the last you will be able to write; and if it seems bad you wonder whether everything you have done isn’t poor stuff really; and it is one kind of agony while you are writing, and another kind when you aren’t.

Writing, Agony, Trying

Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it.

Running, Writing, May

The wounded surgeon plies the steel That questions the distempered part; Beneath the bleeding hands we feel The sharp compassion of the healer's art Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Art, Compassion, Hands

'Four Quartets' 'East Coker' (1940) pt. 4

Shape without form, shade without color, Paralyzed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom Remember us-if at all-not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.

Eye, Men, Color

"The Hollow Men" l. 13 (1925)

With out some kind of god, man is not very intresting

Men, Kind

Tradition: how the vitality of the past enriches the life of the present.

Healing, Past, Vitality

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats 5 Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question … 10 Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.

Night, Oysters, Talking

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" l. 13 (1917)

Time present and time past / are both perhaps present in time future.

Past, Times Past, Quartets

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

I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls ... Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead.

Children, Wall, Hate

Hurry up, please, its time.

Time, Please

The Waste Land l. 169 (1922)

If one has to earn a living, therefore, the safest occupation is that most remote from the arts.

Art, Occupation, Ifs

Eliot, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Professor T S Eliot (2011). “Letters of T. S. Eliot: 1898-1922”, p.490, Yale University Press

My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.

Trouble, Curtains, Up And Down

The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in the end it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it. At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means?

Mean, Rivers, Environmental

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