Top 500 T. S. Eliot Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, and I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, and in short, I was afraid.”

— T. S. Eliot

152. “Poetry is not an assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.”

— T. S. Eliot

153. “Put on a face to meet the faces that you meet – T S Eliot – used in The Book Of Peach.”

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

156. “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

157. “I can connect Nothing with nothing.”

— T. S. Eliot

158. “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

159. “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

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

— T. S. Eliot

161. “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

162. “My mind may be American but my heart is British.”

— T. S. Eliot

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

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

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

170. “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

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

— T. S. Eliot

172. “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

173. “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

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

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

176. “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

177. “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

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

— T. S. Eliot

179. “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

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

— T. S. Eliot

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

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

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

186. “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

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

— T. S. Eliot

189. “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

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

— T. S. Eliot

192. “You have gone through life in sleep, Never woken to the nightmare. I tell you, life would be unendurable If you were wide awake.”

— T. S. Eliot

193. “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

194. “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

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

— T. S. Eliot

196. “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

197. “Only through time time is conquered.”

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

199. “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

200. “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