So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
T. S. Eliot
Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?
T. S. Eliot
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T. S. Eliot
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.
T. S. Eliot
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.
T. S. Eliot
Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.
T. S. Eliot
If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
T. S. Eliot
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
T. S. Eliot
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T. S. Eliot
Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.
T. S. Eliot
Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.
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 emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
T. S. Eliot
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.
T. S. Eliot
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
T. S. Eliot
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.
T. S. Eliot
You are the music while the music lasts.
T. S. Eliot
The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
T. S. Eliot
Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.
T. S. Eliot
It’s strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.
T. S. Eliot
Home is where one starts from.
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
In my beginning is my end.
T. S. Eliot
It’s not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.
T. S. Eliot
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
T. S. Eliot
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.’
T. S. Eliot
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?
T. S. Eliot
There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.
T. S. Eliot
This love is silent.
T. S. Eliot
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
T. S. Eliot
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.
T. S. Eliot
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.
T. S. Eliot
O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.
T. S. Eliot
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
T. S. Eliot
And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.
T. S. Eliot
The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.
T. S. Eliot
A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.
T. S. Eliot
The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
T. S. Eliot
We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
T. S. Eliot
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.
T. S. Eliot
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
T. S. Eliot
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.
T. S. Eliot
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.
T. S. Eliot
Let’s not be narrow, nasty, and negative.
T. S. Eliot
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
T. S. Eliot
People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.
T. S. Eliot
Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.
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.
T. S. Eliot
Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.
T. S. Eliot
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.
T. S. Eliot
April is the cruellest month.
T. S. Eliot
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.
T. S. Eliot
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.
T. S. Eliot
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T. S. Eliot
If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
T. S. Eliot