Top 500 T. S. Eliot Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.”

— T. S. Eliot

402. “The difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.”

— T. S. Eliot

403. “As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.”

— T. S. Eliot

404. “Anecdote: It is by no means self-evident that human beings are most real when most violently excited; violent physical passions do not in themselves differentiate men from each other, but rather tend to reduce them to the same state.”

— T. S. Eliot

405. “All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords.”

— T. S. Eliot

406. “To men of a certain type The suspicion that they are incapable of loving Is as disturbing to their self-esteem As, in cruder men, the fear of impotence.”

— T. S. Eliot

407. “Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.”

— T. S. Eliot

408. “We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value – a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity.”

— T. S. Eliot

409. “They don’t understand what it is to be awake, To be living on several planes at once Though one cannot speak with several voices at once.”

— T. S. Eliot

410. “The sense of wellbeing! Its often with us When we are young, but then it’s not noticed; And by the time one has grown to consciousness It comes less often.”

— T. S. Eliot

411. “Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.”

— T. S. Eliot

412. “Maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one’s age, and with the same intensity as the emotions of youth.”

— T. S. Eliot

413. “Our emotions Are only “incidents” In the effort to keep day and night together.”

— T. S. Eliot

414. “With a poem you can say ‘I got my feeling into words for myself. I now have the equivalent in words for that much of what I have felt.’”

— T. S. Eliot

415. “His laughter tinkled among the teacups.”

— T. S. Eliot

416. “Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste and end by debauching it.”

— T. S. Eliot

417. “This form, this face, this life living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken, the awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.”

— T. S. Eliot

418. “One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.”

— T. S. Eliot

419. “I suspect that in our loathing of totalitarianism, there is infused a good deal of admiration for its efficiency.”

— T. S. Eliot

420. “I do not approve the extermination of the enemy; the policy of exterminating or, as it is barbarously said, liquidating enemies, is one of the most alarming developments of modern war and peace, from the point of view of those who desire the survival.”

— T. S. Eliot

421. “We must learn to suffer more.”

— T. S. Eliot

422. “Poetry, if it is not to be a lifeless repetition of forms, must be constantly exploring “the frontiers of the spirit.” But these frontiers are not like the surveys of geographical explorers, conquered once for all and settled. The frontiers of the spirit are more like the jungle which, unless continuously kept under control, is always ready to encroach and eventually obliterate the cultivated area.”

— T. S. Eliot

423. “Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.”

— T. S. Eliot

424. “We see the light but see not whence it comes. O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!”

— T. S. Eliot

425. “In spite of all the dishonour, the broken standards, the broken lives, The broken faith in one place or another, There was something left that was more than the tales Of old men on winter evenings.”

— T. S. Eliot

426. “It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is a life.”

— T. S. Eliot

427. “The things I thought were real are shadows, and the real Are what I thought were private shadows.”

— T. S. Eliot

428. “To justify Christian morality because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion.”

— T. S. Eliot

429. “Death! I had not thought Death had undone so many.”

— T. S. Eliot

430. “As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill.”

— T. S. Eliot

431. “That meddling in other people’s affairs... formerly conducted by the most discreet intrigue is now openly advocated under the name of intervention.”

— T. S. Eliot

432. “And so each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate.”

— T. S. Eliot

433. “There is no method but to be very intelligent.”

— T. S. Eliot

434. “I’ve been born, and once is enough.”

— T. S. Eliot

435. “Playwriting gets into your blood and you can’t stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.”

— T. S. Eliot

436. “We must always take risks. That is our destiny.”

— T. S. Eliot

437. “But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.”

— T. S. Eliot

438. “The nymphs are departed.”

— T. S. Eliot

439. “There is no water, so things are bad. If there were water, it would be better. But there is no water.”

— T. S. Eliot

440. “Two people who know they do not understand each other, breeding children whom they do not understand and who will never understand them.”

— T. S. Eliot

441. “It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.”

— T. S. Eliot

442. “He laughed like an irresponsible foetus.”

— T. S. Eliot

443. “There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.”

— T. S. Eliot

444. “Without Christianity we might, of course, merely sink into an apathetic decline.”

— T. S. Eliot

445. “To country people Cows are mild, And flee from any stick they throw; But I’m a timid town bred child, And all the cattle seem to know.”

— T. S. Eliot

446. “Heretic... is a person who seizes upon a truth and pushes it to the point at which it becomes a falsehood.”

— T. S. Eliot

447. “Whatever you do, don’t whimper, but take the consequences.”

— T. S. Eliot

448. “We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then.”

— T. S. Eliot

449. “There are evil neighborhoods of noise and evil neighborhoods of silence, and Eeldrop and Appleplex preferred the latter, as being the more evil. It.”

— T. S. Eliot

450. “The role of art is not to express the personality but to overcome it.”

— T. S. Eliot