T. S. Eliot

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

— T. S. Eliot

I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

— T. S. Eliot

Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm, retreating to the corner of arm and knee, eager to be reassured, taking pleasure in the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree.

— T. S. Eliot

In my beginning is my end.

— T. S. Eliot

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

— T. S. Eliot

For every life and every act consequence of good and evil can be shown and as in time results of many deeds are blended so good and evil in the end become confounded.

— T. S. Eliot

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

— T. S. Eliot

In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.

— T. S. Eliot

And what the dead had no speech for, when living, they can tell you, being dead: the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

— T. S. Eliot

The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

— T. S. Eliot

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.

— T. S. Eliot

I suppose some editors are failed writers; but so are most writers.

— T. S. Eliot

Our emotions are only incidents in the effort to keep day and night together.

— T. S. Eliot

So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.

— T. S. Eliot

We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started... and know the place for the first time.

— T. S. Eliot

There are flood and drought over the eyes and in the mouth, dead water and dead sand contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil gapes at the vanity of toil, laughs without mirth. This is the death of the earth.

— T. S. Eliot

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

— T. S. Eliot

Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison.

— T. S. Eliot

Friendship should be more than biting time can sever.

— T. S. Eliot

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be: am an attendant lord, one that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two, advise the prince.

— T. S. Eliot

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

— T. S. Eliot

Hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

— T. S. Eliot

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

The awful daring of a moment's surrender which an age of prudence can never retract.

— T. S. Eliot

In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

— T. S. Eliot

People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced.

— T. S. Eliot

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

— T. S. Eliot

Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to the brass tacks.

— T. S. Eliot

When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.

— T. S. Eliot

Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter.

— T. S. Eliot

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now, by suffering. This is the easier victory.

— T. S. Eliot

There is no method but to be very intelligent.

— T. S. Eliot

You are the music while the music lasts.

— T. S. Eliot

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

All cases are unique and very similar to others.

— T. S. Eliot

Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it.

— T. S. Eliot

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

What we know of other people's only our memory of the moments during which we knew them.

— T. S. Eliot

A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.

— T. S. Eliot

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 we have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things.

— T. S. Eliot

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.

— T. S. Eliot

We must believe that emotion recollected in tranquillity is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not recollected and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is tranquil only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.

— T. S. Eliot

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

I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.

— T. S. Eliot

Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

— T. S. Eliot

If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, you must accept the terms it offers you.

— T. S. Eliot

Time past and time future what might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.

— T. S. Eliot

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.

— T. S. Eliot

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

— T. S. Eliot

It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.

— T. S. Eliot

Footfalls echo in the memory down the passage which we did not take towards the door we never opened into the rose-garden.

— T. S. Eliot

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.

— T. S. Eliot

April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.

— T. S. Eliot

Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.

— T. S. Eliot

It 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

It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor.

— T. S. Eliot

A tradition without intelligence is not worth having.

— T. S. Eliot

War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.

— T. S. Eliot

For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice.

— T. S. Eliot

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

Midwinter spring is its own season Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches, In windless cold that is the heart's heat.

— T. S. Eliot

Birth, and copulation, and death. I've been born, and once is enough. You dont remember, but I remember, Once is enough.

— T. S. Eliot

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope / for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love / 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

I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter; / 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