Top 500 T. S. Eliot Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Uncorseted, her friendly bust Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.”

— T. S. Eliot

452. “To country people Cows are mild, And flee from any stick they throw; But I’m a timid town bred child, And all the cattle seem to know.”

— T. S. Eliot

453. “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

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

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

457. “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

458. “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

459. “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

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

— T. S. Eliot

461. “The role of art is not to express the personality but to overcome it.”

— T. S. Eliot

462. “Business today consists in persuading crowds.”

— T. S. Eliot

463. “That meddling in other people’s affairs... formerly conducted by the most discreet intrigue is now openly advocated under the name of intervention.”

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

466. “Do I dare to eat a peach?”

— T. S. Eliot

467. “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

468. “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

469. “War among men defiles this world.”

— T. S. Eliot

470. “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

471. “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

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. “Past art is subject to change.”

— T. S. Eliot

475. “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

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

— T. S. Eliot

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

— 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. “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

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

— T. S. Eliot

481. “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

482. “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

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

— T. S. Eliot

484. “All time is unreedemable.”

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

487. “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

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

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

— T. S. Eliot

492. “Poetry is a mug’s game.”

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

498. “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

499. “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

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