Top 500 T. S. Eliot Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.”

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

203. “Fading, fading: strength beyond hope and despair climbing the third stair. Lord, I am not worthy Lord, I am not worthy but speak the word only.”

— T. S. Eliot

204. “People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced.”

— T. S. Eliot

205. “The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely.”

— T. S. Eliot

206. “Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has never happened before.”

— T. S. Eliot

207. “There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.”

— T. S. Eliot

208. “If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable.”

— T. S. Eliot

209. “There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.”

— T. S. Eliot

210. “I am moved by fancies that are curled, around these images and cling, the notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.”

— T. S. Eliot

211. “Sensibility alters from generation to generation in everybody, whether we will or no; but expression is only altered by a man of genius.”

— T. S. Eliot

212. “Art is the escape from personality.”

— T. S. Eliot

213. “It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.”

— T. S. Eliot

214. “Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other Who think the same thoughts without need of speech.”

— T. S. Eliot

215. “Would it have been worth while, To have bitten off the matter with a smile, To have squeezed the universe into a ball To roll it towards some overwhelming question.”

— T. S. Eliot

216. “The circle of our understanding is a very restricted area.”

— T. S. Eliot

217. “I shall not want Honor in Heaven For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney And have talk with Coriolanus And other heroes of that kidney.”

— T. S. Eliot

218. “Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall My buried life, and Paris in the spring, I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world To be wonderful and youthful afterall.”

— T. S. Eliot

219. “We have all our private terrors, our particular shadows, our secret fears. We are afraid in a fear which we cannot face, which none understands, and our hearts are torn from us, our brains unskinned like the layers of an onion, ourselves the last.”

— T. S. Eliot

220. “And right action is freedom From past and future also.”

— T. S. Eliot

221. “The majority of mankind is lazyminded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith.”

— T. S. Eliot

222. “Humankind can’t stand too much reality.”

— T. S. Eliot

223. “Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness...”

— T. S. Eliot

224. “Everyone’s alone – or so it seems to me. They make noises, and think they are talking to each other; They make faces, and think they understand each other. And I’m sure they don’t. Is that a delusion?”

— T. S. Eliot

225. “Humor is also a way of saying something serious.”

— T. S. Eliot

226. “No scheme for a change of society can be made to appear immediately palatable, except by falsehood, until society has become so desperate that it will accept any change.”

— T. S. Eliot

227. “The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.”

— T. S. Eliot

228. “People are only influenced in the direction in which they want to go, and influence consists largely in making them conscious of their wishes to proceed in that direction.”

— T. S. Eliot

229. “There will be time to murder and create.”

— T. S. Eliot

230. “The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.”

— T. S. Eliot

231. “A wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude toward God.”

— T. S. Eliot

232. “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”

— T. S. Eliot

233. “I don’t know much about gods, but I think the river is a strong, brown god.”

— T. S. Eliot

234. “Every moment is a new and shocking transvaluation of all we have ever been.”

— T. S. Eliot

235. “Half 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. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

— T. S. Eliot

236. “If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.”

— T. S. Eliot

237. “Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation.”

— T. S. Eliot

238. “When a Cat adopts you there is nothing to be done about it except to put up with it until the wind changes.”

— T. S. Eliot

239. “I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare.”

— T. S. Eliot

240. “Think neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.”

— T. S. Eliot

241. “He is haunted by a demon, a demon against which he feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing; and the words, the poem he makes, are a kind of exorcism of this demon.”

— T. S. Eliot

242. “Each way means loneliness – and communion.”

— T. S. Eliot

243. “The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.”

— T. S. Eliot

244. “Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know What life is, you who hold it in your hands”;.”

— T. S. Eliot

245. “So the lover must struggle for words.”

— T. S. Eliot

246. “The great ages did not contain the best talent, they wasted less.”

— T. S. Eliot

247. “We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.”

— T. S. Eliot

248. “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;.”

— T. S. Eliot

249. “If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby ‘it.’”

— T. S. Eliot

250. “To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now.”

— T. S. Eliot