Top 500 T. S. Eliot Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.”

— T. S. Eliot

352. “And in short, I was afraid.”

— T. S. Eliot

353. “Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake.”

— T. S. Eliot

354. “Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.”

— T. S. Eliot

355. “When comparing works of art, it is important that the art itself, and not the artists, be considered.”

— T. S. Eliot

356. “A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.”

— T. S. Eliot

357. “Genuine blasphemy, genuine in spirit and not purely verbal, is the product of partial belief, and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect Christian.”

— T. S. Eliot

358. “Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison.”

— T. S. Eliot

359. “Time past and time future allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time.”

— T. S. Eliot

360. “The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself.”

— T. S. Eliot

361. “Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think.”

— T. S. Eliot

362. “I am glad you have a Cat, but I do not believe it is So remarkable a cat as My Cat.”

— T. S. Eliot

363. “When war is not just it is subsequently justified; so it becomes many things. In reality, an unjust war is merely piracy. It consists of piracy, ego and, more than anything, money. War is our century’s prostitution.”

— T. S. Eliot

364. “Men dislike being awakened from their death in life.”

— T. S. Eliot

365. “Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.”

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

367. “We fight to keep something alive rather than in the expectation that anything will triumph.”

— T. S. Eliot

368. “Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; 180 Departed, have left no addresses.”

— T. S. Eliot

369. “It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the ‘dear deceit’ of beauty.”

— T. S. Eliot

370. “Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.”

— T. S. Eliot

371. “And through the spaces of the dark Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium.”

— T. S. Eliot

372. “I have gone at dusk through narrow streets and watched the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men leaning out of windows.”

— T. S. Eliot

373. “A thousand policemen directing traffic cannot tell you why you come or where you go.”

— T. S. Eliot

374. “Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.”

— T. S. Eliot

375. “Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.”

— T. S. Eliot

376. “Our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and of our visible, sensible world.”

— T. S. Eliot

377. “I believe the moment of birth Is when we have knowledge of death I believe the season of birth Is the season of sacrifice.”

— T. S. Eliot

378. “Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.”

— T. S. Eliot

379. “What life have you if you have not life together?”

— T. S. Eliot

380. “All cases are unique and very similar to others.”

— T. S. Eliot

381. “Again I must remind you that a dog’s a dog-a cat’s a cat.”

— T. S. Eliot

382. “With cats, some say, one rule is true: Don’t speak till you are spoken to.”

— T. S. Eliot

383. “If you find examples of humanism which are anti-religious, or at least in opposition to the religious faith of the place and time, then such humanism is purely destructive, for it has never found anything to replace what it has destroyed.”

— T. S. Eliot

384. “For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.”

— T. S. Eliot

385. “Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.”

— T. S. Eliot

386. “No artist produces great art by a deliberate attempt to express his own personality.”

— T. S. Eliot

387. “Sand. Everywhere. In the bed, in the shower, all over the floor. Grrrrr.”

— T. S. Eliot

388. “The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible.”

— T. S. Eliot

389. “And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.”

— T. S. Eliot

390. “Those who talk of the bible as a monument of English prose are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.”

— T. S. Eliot

391. “The young feel tired at the end of an action, the old at the beginning.”

— T. S. Eliot

392. “Why speak of love? We were used to each other.”

— T. S. Eliot

393. “Success is relative: It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things, It is what he can make, not what you would make for him.”

— T. S. Eliot

394. “He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.”

— T. S. Eliot

395. “You can evade life, but you can not evade Death.”

— T. S. Eliot

396. “It’s harder to confess the sin that no one believes in Than the crime that everyone can appreciate. For the crime is in relation to the law And the sin is in relation to the sinner.”

— T. S. Eliot

397. “It is the just man who Like a bold lion, should be without fear.”

— T. S. Eliot

398. “It takes so many years to learn that one is dead.”

— T. S. Eliot

399. “Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and undesiring Except in the aspect of time Caught in the form of limitation Between un-being and being. Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of children in the foliage.”

— T. S. Eliot

400. “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is incarnation. Here the impossible union of spheres of existence is actual. Here the past and future are conquered and reconciled.”

— T. S. Eliot