T.S. Eliot Quotes

page 3

“Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.”

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;”

“This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.”

“If time and space, as sages say,
Are things which cannot be,
The sun which does not feel decay
No greater is than we.
So why, Love, should we ever pray
To live a century?
The butterfly that lives a day
Has lived eternity.”

“Where is the Life we lost in living?”

“He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience.”

“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.”

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

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

“Then spoke the thunder
DA Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed.”

“We must learn to suffer more.”

“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”

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

“The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence”

“It is impossible to say just what I mean!”

“My mind may be American but my heart is British.”

“The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

The dancers are all gone under the hill.”

“Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow”

“Hell is oneself,
Hell is alone.”

“Till Human voices wake us, and we drown.”

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

“The journey, Not the destination matters…”

“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…”

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

“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.”

“The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood--
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.”

“Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?”

“Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.”

“I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.”

“The still point in a turning world.”

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

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

“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”

“The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.”

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

“I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.”

“I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.”

“For he will do
As he do do
And there's no doing anything about it!”

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

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

“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.”

“All time is unreedemable.”

“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.”

“Now that the lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room”

“And if all that is meaningless, I want to be cured
Of a craving for something I cannot find And of the shame of never finding it.”

“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.”

“Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'/Let us go and make our visit.”

“Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face”

“And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time”