Top 500 T. S. Eliot Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “It is just the literature that we read for ‘amusement’ or ‘purely for pleasure’ that may have the greatest, least suspected, earliest influence on us.”

— T. S. Eliot

452. “Uncorseted, her friendly bust Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.”

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

454. “In life there is not time to grieve long.”

— T. S. Eliot

455. “The naming of cats is a difficult matter.”

— T. S. Eliot

456. “When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.”

— T. S. Eliot

457. “The Rum Turn Tugger is a terrible bore: When you let him in, then he wants to be out; He’s always on the wrong side of every door, And as soon as he’s at home, then he’d like to get about.”

— T. S. Eliot

458. “In a mind charged with an eager purpose and an unfinished vindictiveness, there is no room for new feelings.”

— T. S. Eliot

459. “Business today consists in persuading crowds.”

— T. S. Eliot

460. “I was too slow a mover to be a boxer. It was much easier to be a poet.”

— T. S. Eliot

461. “Do I dare to eat a peach?”

— T. S. Eliot

462. “If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.”

— T. S. Eliot

463. “And when all the world came back And the light crept up between the shutters, And you heard the sparrows in the gutters, You had such a vision of the street As the street hardly understands;.”

— T. S. Eliot

464. “Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.”

— T. S. Eliot

465. “A martyrdom is always the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways. It is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, and who no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of being a martyr.”

— T. S. Eliot

466. “I must say Bernard Shaw is greatly improved by music.”

— T. S. Eliot

467. “The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.”

— T. S. Eliot

468. “She is deeply concerned with the ways of the mice – Their behaviour’s not good and their manners not nice; So when she has got them lined up on the matting, She teaches them music, crocheting and tatting.”

— T. S. Eliot

469. “The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree are of equal duration.”

— T. S. Eliot

470. “The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”

— T. S. Eliot

471. “War among men defiles this world.”

— T. S. Eliot

472. “Of the past you can only see what is past, Not what is always present. That is what matters.”

— T. S. Eliot

473. “We learn what poetry is – if we ever learn – by reading it.”

— T. S. Eliot

474. “When we talk about Poetry, with a capital P, we are apt to think only of the more intense emotions or the more magical phrase: nevertheless there are a great many casements in poetry which are not magic, and which do not open on the foam of perilous seas, but are perfectly good windows for all that.”

— T. S. Eliot

475. “Past art is subject to change.”

— T. S. Eliot

476. “A book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.”

— T. S. Eliot

477. “And indeed there will be time for the yellow smoke that slides along the street rubbing its back upon the window-panes; there will be time, there will be time to 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 hands that 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 toast and tea.”

— T. S. Eliot

478. “And I hope we can contrive his future happiness. Do not discuss his absence. Please behave only As if nothing had happened in the last eight years.”

— T. S. Eliot

479. “No one society and no one age of it realises all the values of civilisation. Not all of these values may be compatible with each other: what is at least as certain is that in realising some we lose the appreciation of others.”

— T. S. Eliot

480. “When the gods know that a god hath fallen, With this kindly feeling They do encourage him – Be thou a god again and again.”

— T. S. Eliot

481. “All time is unreedemable.”

— T. S. Eliot

482. “Because the particular has no language. One thinks to escape.”

— T. S. Eliot

483. “The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions.”

— T. S. Eliot

484. “I have saved this afternoon for you.”

— T. S. Eliot

485. “Family affection Was a kind of formal obligation, a duty Only noticed by its neglect.”

— T. S. Eliot

486. “It is not my conscience, Not my mind, that is diseased, but the world I have to live in.”

— T. S. Eliot

487. “Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.”

— T. S. Eliot

488. “You must not on any account give me credit for being penetrating. I have impressed people that way before, and the result is always disaster.”

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

490. “What is that noise?”

— T. S. Eliot

491. “Poetry is a mug’s game.”

— T. S. Eliot

492. “If you want it you must obtain it by great labor.”

— T. S. Eliot

493. “The suburban evening was grey and yellow on Sunday; the gardens of the small houses to left and right were rank with ivy and tall grass and lilac bushes; the tropical South London verdure was dusty above and mouldy below; the tepid air swarmed with flies. Eeldrop, at the window, welcomed the smoky smell of lilac, the gramaphones, the choir of the Baptist chapel, and the sight of three small girls playing cards on the steps of the police station.”

— T. S. Eliot

494. “In the last few years everything I’d done up to sixty or so has seemed very childish.”

— T. S. Eliot

495. “People find a way in which they can say something.”

— T. S. Eliot

496. “A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.”

— T. S. Eliot

497. “An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.”

— T. S. Eliot

498. “A good deal of confusion could be avoided, if we refrained from setting before the group, what can be the aim only of the individual; and before society as a whole, what can be the aim only of the group.”

— T. S. Eliot

499. “Because I know that time is time and place is always and only place and what is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place, I rejoice that things are as they are and I renounce the blessed faces and renounce the voice because I cannot hope to turn again.”

— T. S. Eliot

500. “But I tell you, a cat needs a name that’s particular, A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified, Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular, Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride? Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum, Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat, Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum – Names that never belong to more than one cat.”

— T. S. Eliot