Top 500 T. S. Eliot Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 10

151. “The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.”

— T. S. Eliot

152. “I journeyed to London, to the timekept City, Where the River flows, with foreign flotations. There I was told: we have too many churches, And too few chop-houses.”

— T. S. Eliot

153. “A tradition without intelligence is not worth having.”

— T. S. Eliot

154. “I can connect Nothing with nothing.”

— T. S. Eliot

155. “It is not enough to understand what we ought to be, unless we know what we are; and we do not understand what we are, unless we know what we ought to be.”

— T. S. Eliot

156. “To approach the stranger is to invite the unexpected, release a new force, let the genie out of the bottle. It is to start a new train of events that is beyond your control...”

— T. S. Eliot

157. “Disillusion can become itself an illusion If we rest in it.”

— T. S. Eliot

158. “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 emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.”

— T. S. Eliot

159. “Lady of silences Calm and distressed Torn and most whole Rose of memory Rose of forgetfulness Exhausted and life-giving Worried reposeful The single Rose Is now the Garden Where all loves end Terminate torment Of love unsatisfied The greater torment Of love satisfied End of the endless Journey to no end Conclusion of all that Is inconclusible Speech without word and Word of no speech Grace to the Mother For the Garden Where all love ends.”

— T. S. Eliot

160. “The dripping blood our only drink, The bloody flesh our only food: In spite of which we like to think That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.”

— T. S. Eliot

161. “I must tell you that I should really like to think there’s something wrong with me- Because, if there isn’t, then there’s something wrong with the world itself-and that’s much more frightening! That would be terrible. So I’d rather believe there is something wrong with me, that could be put right.”

— T. S. Eliot

162. “All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.”

— T. S. Eliot

163. “In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession.”

— T. S. Eliot

164. “If we all were judged according to the consequences Of all our words and deeds, beyond the intention And beyond our limited understanding Of ourselves and others, we should all be condemned.”

— T. S. Eliot

165. “Justice itself tends to be corrupted by political passion.”

— T. S. Eliot

166. “Think not forever of yourselves, O Chiefs, nor of your own generation. Think of continuing generations of our families, think of our grandchildren and of those yet unborn, whose faces are coming from beneath the ground.”

— T. S. Eliot

167. “What is true, is true only for one time and only for one place.”

— T. S. Eliot

168. “I love reading another reader’s list of favorites. Even when I find I do not share their tastes or predilections, I am provoked to compare, contrast, and contradict. It is a most healthy exercise, and one altogether fruitful.”

— T. S. Eliot

169. “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

170. “Who is the third who walks always beside you? 360 When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman – But who is that on the other side of you?”

— T. S. Eliot

171. “The work of creation is never without travail.”

— T. S. Eliot

172. “The chief danger about Paris is that it is such a strong stimulant.”

— T. S. Eliot

173. “What day is the day that we know that we hope for or fear for? Every day is the day we should fear from or hope from. One moment Weighs like another. Only in retrospection, selection, We say, that was the day. The critical moment That is always now, and here.”

— T. S. Eliot

174. “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

175. “What have we given? My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment’s surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed.”

— T. S. Eliot

176. “O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.”

— T. S. Eliot

177. “Philosophy: a purple bullfinch in a lilac tree.”

— T. S. Eliot

178. “Someone said, ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.”

— T. S. Eliot

179. “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

180. “Death has a hundred hands and walks by a thousand ways.”

— T. S. Eliot

181. “Birth, and copulation, and death; that’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks.”

— T. S. Eliot

182. “Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self.”

— T. S. Eliot

183. “As we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated of dead and living.”

— T. S. Eliot

184. “The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.”

— T. S. Eliot

185. “Wavering between the profit and the loss In this brief transit where the dreams cross The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying.”

— T. S. Eliot

186. “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

— T. S. Eliot

187. “What is this self-inside us, this silent observer, severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us, and urge us onto futile activity, and in the end, judge us still more severely for the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?”

— T. S. Eliot

188. “Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius.”

— T. S. Eliot

189. “Men tighten the knot of confusion Into perfect misunderstanding.”

— T. S. Eliot

190. “Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.”

— T. S. Eliot

191. “A national culture, if it is to flourish, should be a constellation of cultures, the constitutes of which, benefiting each other, benefit the whole.”

— T. S. Eliot

192. “Only through time time is conquered.”

— T. S. Eliot

193. “In the life of one man, never The same time returns.”

— T. S. Eliot

194. “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

195. “True friends will always push you towards the great possibilities of your future, false friends will always chain you to the mistakes in your past.”

— T. S. Eliot

196. “Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.”

— T. S. Eliot

197. “Because these wings are no longer wings to fly But merely vans to beat the air The air which is now thoroughly small and dry Smaller and dryer than the will Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.”

— T. S. Eliot

198. “You will have to live with those memories and make them into something new. Only by acceptance of the past will you alter its meaning.”

— T. S. Eliot

199. “Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.”

— T. S. Eliot

200. “The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without.”

— T. S. Eliot