Top 500 T. S. Eliot Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 10

101. “Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair-.”

— T. S. Eliot

102. “Teach us to care and not to care.”

— T. S. Eliot

103. “Old men ought to be explorers.”

— T. S. Eliot

104. “I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”

— T. S. Eliot

105. “We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.”

— T. S. Eliot

106. “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless. The houses are all gone under the sea. The dancers are all gone under the hill.”

— T. S. Eliot

107. “Dayodhuam: I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.”

— T. S. Eliot

108. “Hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.”

— T. S. Eliot

109. “That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all.”

— T. S. Eliot

110. “The old should be explorers, be curious, risk transgression, explore oldness itself.”

— T. S. Eliot

111. “I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”

— T. S. Eliot

112. “A woman drew her long black hair out tight, And fiddled whisper music on those strings, And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings, And crawled head downward down a blackened wall.”

— T. S. Eliot

113. “Cats must have three names-an everyday name, such as Peter; a more particular, dignified name, such as Quaxo, Bombalurina, or Jellylorum; and, thirdly, the name the cat thinks up for himself, his deep and inscrutable singular Name.”

— T. S. Eliot

114. “The greatest proof of Christianity for others is not how far a man can logically analyze his reasons for believing, but how far in practice he will stake his life on his belief.”

— T. S. Eliot

115. “In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.”

— T. S. Eliot

116. “Books. Cats. Life is good.”

— T. S. Eliot

117. “We do not pass through the same door twice Or return to the door through which we did not pass.”

— T. S. Eliot

118. “To each individual the world will take on a different connotation of meaning-the important lies in the desire to search for an answer.”

— T. S. Eliot

119. “Love compels cruelty To those who do not understand love.”

— T. S. Eliot

120. “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

121. “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?”

— T. S. Eliot

122. “For every life and every act consequence of good and evil can be shown and as in time results of many deeds are blended so good and evil in the end become confounded.”

— T. S. Eliot

123. “The naming of cats is a difficult matter. It isn’t just one of your holiday games. You may think at first I’m mad as a hatter. When I tell you a cat must have three different names...”

— T. S. Eliot

124. “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”

— T. S. Eliot

125. “It’s not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.”

— T. S. Eliot

126. “I learn a great deal by merely observing you, and letting you talk as long as you please, and taking note of what you do not say.”

— T. S. Eliot

127. “Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, there never was a cat of such deceitfulness and sauvity.”

— T. S. Eliot

128. “It is impossible to say just what I mean!”

— T. S. Eliot

129. “For I have known them all already, known them all – Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

— T. S. Eliot

130. “In my end is my beginning.”

— T. S. Eliot

131. “And indeed there will be time To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair.”

— T. S. Eliot

132. “We should not confuse information with knowledge.”

— T. S. Eliot

133. “Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?”

— T. S. Eliot

134. “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. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.”

— T. S. Eliot

135. “It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good.”

— T. S. Eliot

136. “Light Light The visible reminder of Invisible Light.”

— T. S. Eliot

137. “The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.”

— T. S. Eliot

138. “Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.”

— T. S. Eliot

139. “There are flood and drought over the eyes and in the mouth, dead water and dead sand contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil gapes at the vanity of toil, laughs without mirth. This is the death of the earth.”

— T. S. Eliot

140. “Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmen.”

— T. S. Eliot

141. “I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.”

— T. S. Eliot

142. “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

143. “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be: am an attendant lord, one that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two, advise the prince.”

— T. S. Eliot

144. “In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing.”

— T. S. Eliot

145. “Each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.”

— T. S. Eliot

146. “An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.”

— T. S. Eliot

147. “History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.”

— T. S. Eliot

148. “Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.”

— T. S. Eliot

149. “Redeem the time. Redeem the unread vision of a higher dream...”

— T. S. Eliot

150. “The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.”

— T. S. Eliot