Top 500 T. S. Eliot Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”

— T. S. Eliot

52. “There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.”

— T. S. Eliot

53. “Success is relative. It is what we make of the mess we have made of things.”

— T. S. Eliot

54. “At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives.”

— T. S. Eliot

55. “Those who arrive at the end of the journey are not those who began.”

— T. S. Eliot

56. “The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.”

— T. S. Eliot

57. “Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow.”

— T. S. Eliot

58. “We shall not cease from exploration.”

— T. S. Eliot

59. “The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

— T. S. Eliot

60. “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.”

— T. S. Eliot

61. “Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it.”

— T. S. Eliot

62. “In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away.”

— T. S. Eliot

63. “Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.”

— T. S. Eliot

64. “For you know only a heap of broken images.”

— T. S. Eliot

65. “Unreal friendship may turn to real But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended.”

— T. S. Eliot

66. “So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.”

— T. S. Eliot

67. “And the end and the beginning where always there, before the beginning and after the end.”

— T. S. Eliot

68. “It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape, not from our own time – for we are bound by that – but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.”

— T. S. Eliot

69. “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

70. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

— T. S. Eliot

71. “The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”

— T. S. Eliot

72. “The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we know we started and know the place for the first time.”

— T. S. Eliot

73. “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

— T. S. Eliot

74. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

— T. S. Eliot

75. “Because I know that time is always time and place is always place 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.”

— T. S. Eliot

76. “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.”

— T. S. Eliot

77. “We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.”

— T. S. Eliot

78. “The definition of hell is a place where nothing connects with nothing.”

— T. S. Eliot

79. “There is no such thing as a lost cause, because there is no such thing as a gained cause.”

— T. S. Eliot

80. “Gin and drugs, dear lady, gin and drugs.”

— T. S. Eliot

81. “Talent imitates, genius steals.”

— T. S. Eliot

82. “Tradition: how the vitality of the past enriches the life of the present.”

— T. S. Eliot

83. “My name is only an anagram of toilets.”

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

85. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.”

— T. S. Eliot

86. “Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?”

— T. S. Eliot

87. “He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience.”

— T. S. Eliot

88. “A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after – and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.”

— T. S. Eliot

89. “There’s no vocabulary For love within a family, love that’s lived in But not looked at, love within the light of which All else is seen, the love within which All other love finds speech. This love is silent.”

— T. S. Eliot

90. “When the whole world is running headlong towards the precipice, one who walks in the opposite direction is looked at as being crazy.”

— T. S. Eliot

91. “I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.”

— T. S. Eliot

92. “Turn things you’ve always wanted to do, into things you’ve done.”

— T. S. Eliot

93. “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.”

— T. S. Eliot

94. “Today, you’re halfway to 100! Here’s to optimism, whether it is realistic or not. Happy 50th birthday!”

— T. S. Eliot

95. “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 a toast and tea.”

— T. S. Eliot

96. “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.”

— T. S. Eliot

97. “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

98. “You will find that you survive humiliation. And that’s an experience of incalculable value.”

— T. S. Eliot

99. “Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think; whatever you want, be sure that is what you want; whatever you feel, be sure that is what you feel.”

— T. S. Eliot

100. “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.”

— T. S. Eliot