T. s. eliot quotes

In the mountains, there you feel free.

People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced.

In a mind charged with an eager purpose and an unfinished vindictiveness, there is no room for new feelings.

Finding a way to live the simple life is one of life's supreme complications.

music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts.

Do I dare disturb the universe?

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

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

If you do not push the boundaries, you will never know where they are.

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

We shall not cease from exploring, And the end of our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

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?

At the beach - time you enjoyed wasting, is not wasted.

Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self.

It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.

In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not.

Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.

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

At the still point, there the dance is.

You are the music while the music lasts.

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

No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest- for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.

Distracted from distraction by distraction

If you want it you must obtain it by great labor.

One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.

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.

It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous. Resign yourself to be the fool you are... ...We must always take risks. That is our destiny.

If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

The True Church can never fail. For it is based upon a rock.

The darkness declares the glory of light.

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. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

A wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude toward God.

One thing you cannot know: The sudden extinction of every alternative, The unexpected crash of the iron cataract. You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it. You only know what it is not to hope: You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless Unrecognized by other men, though sometimes by each other.

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

The circle of our understanding is a very restricted area.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.

Can we only love Something created in our own imaginations? Are we all in fact unloving and unloveable? Then one is alone, and if one is alone Then lover and beloved are equally unreal And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams.

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

Men dislike being awakened from their death in life.

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.

Between the desire And the spasm, Between the potency And the existence, Between the essence And the descent, Falls the Shadow.

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

When the whole world is running headlong towards the precipice, one who walks in the opposite direction is looked at as being crazy.

We should not confuse information with knowledge.

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?

Turn things you've always wanted to do, into things you've done

We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.

The greatest proof of Christianity for others is not how far a man can logically analyze his reasons for believing, but how far in practice he will stake his life on his belief.

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

Destiny ... a word which means more than we can find any definitions for. It is a word which can have no meaning in a mechanical universe: if that which is wound up must run down, what destiny is there in that? Destiny is not necessitarianism, and it is not caprice: it is something essentially meaningful. Each man has his destiny, though some men are undoubtedly "men of destiny" in a sense in which most men are not.

Those who arrive at the end of the journey are not those who began.

Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment.

Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think; whatever you want, be sure that is what you want; whatever you feel, be sure that is what you feel.

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.'

Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, Falls the shadow.

The old should be explorers, be curious, risk transgression, explore oldness itself.

Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?

Tradition: how the vitality of the past enriches the life of the present.

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.

Survival is your strength not your shame.

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.

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

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

To become what you are not, behave as you do not.

Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.

We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

What is true, is true only for one time and only for one place.

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.

If one has to earn a living, therefore, the safest occupation is that most remote from the arts.

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

The tendency of liberals is to create bodies of men and women-of all classes-detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion-mob rule. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined.

It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good.

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

Unreal friendship may turn to real But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended

Everyone gets the experience. Some get the lesson.

The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

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

The definition of hell is a place where nothing connects with nothing.

We had the experience, but we missed the meaning.

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

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.

We must always take risks. That is our destiny.

Between the vision and the act lies the shadow.

The journey, Not the destination matters.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

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

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

life is long between the desire and the spasm.

I learn a great deal by merely observing you, and letting you talk as long as you please, and taking note of what you do not say.

Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

Where is the Life we lost in living?

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.

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

You can evade life, but you can not evade Death.

Men tighten the knot of confusion Into perfect misunderstanding.

If we really want to pray we must first learn to listen, for in the silence of the heart God speaks.

Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.

Nothing pleases people more than to go on thinking what they have always thought, and at the same time imagine that they are thinking something new and daring: it combines the advantage of security and the delight of adventure.

Talent imitates, genius steals.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.

We can at least try to understand our own motives, passions, and prejudices, so as to be conscious of what we are doing when we apeal to those of others. This is very difficult, because our own prejudice and emotional bias always seems to us so rational.

The end is where we start from.

The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started.

The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man

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.

There's no vocabulary For love within a family, love that's lived in But not looked at, love within the light of which All else is seen, the love within which All other love finds speech. This love is silent.

My name is only an anagram of toilets.

To make an end is to make a beginning.

We do not pass twice through the same door Or return to the door through which we did not pass.

A national culture, if it is to flourish, should be a constellation of cultures, the constitutes of which, benefiting each other, benefit the whole.

Men live by forgetting and woman live on memories.

In life there is not time to grieve long.

Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God. . . . So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

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

Every moment is a fresh beginning.

For most of us, there is only the unattended Moment, the moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts