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T.S. Eliot Quotes
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Thomas Stearns Eliot, was a British essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and "one of the twentieth century's major poets". He moved from his native United States to England in 1914 at the age of 25, settling, working, and marrying there. He eventually became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39, renouncing his American citizenship.

Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" , which was seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement. It was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including The Waste Land , "The Hollow Men" , "Ash Wednesday" , and Four Quartets . He was also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party . He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry".

✵ 26. September 1888 – 4. January 1965   •   Other names Thomas S. Eliot, టి ఎస్ ఎలియట్
T.S. Eliot photo
T.S. Eliot: 270   quotes 46   likes

T.S. Eliot Quotes

“If we all were judged according to the consequences
Of all our words and deeds, beyond the intention
And beyond our limited understanding
Of ourselves and others, we should all be condemned.”

T.S. Eliot
Understanding

“Grishkin is nice: her
Russian eye is underlined for emphasis;
Uncorseted, her friendly bust
Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.”

T.S. Eliot book Poems

"Whispers of Immortality"; "Grishkin" has been identified by Ezra Pound as having been "Serafima Astafieva" a Russian dancer.
Poems (1920)

“The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.”

T.S. Eliot book Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

The Naming of Cats
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)

Game , Cats , Thinking , Holiday

“When the Stranger says: "What is the meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?"
What will you answer? "We all dwell together
To make money from each other"? or "This is a community"?”

T.S. Eliot

Choruses from The Rock (1934)

Love , Money , Communication

“Fortunate the man who, at the right moment meets the right friend; fortunate also the man who at the right moment meets the right enemy. 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 of culture. One needs the enemy… A country within which the divisions have goon too far is a danger to itself: a country which is too well united - whether by nature or by device, by hounest purpose or by fraud and oppression - is a menace to others.”

T.S. Eliot

Notes towards the definition of culture(1948)

War , Peace , Fraud , Nature

“The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a sceptic or an unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination to think anything out to a conclusion.”

T.S. Eliot

Introduction to Pascal’s Pensées

Faith , Thinking

“Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again”

T.S. Eliot

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

Hope , Spring , Flowers , Drink

“The soul of Man must quicken to creation.”

T.S. Eliot

Choruses from The Rock (1934)

Soul

“Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.”

T.S. Eliot

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

Dreams , Time , Drawing

“Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.”

T.S. Eliot

Choruses from The Rock (1934)

Soul , Question

“In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.”

T.S. Eliot book The Waste Land

Source: The Waste Land (1922), Line 385 et seq.

Home , Grass

“O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.”

T.S. Eliot book The Waste Land

Source: The Waste Land (1922), Line 320 et seq.

“Our age is an age of moderate virtue
And moderate vice”

T.S. Eliot

Choruses from The Rock (1934)

Age

“The broad-backed hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.”

T.S. Eliot book Poems

"The Hippopotamus"
Poems (1920)

“O Light Invisible, we praise Thee!
Too bright for mortal vision.”

T.S. Eliot

Choruses from The Rock (1934)

Light

“Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom´
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.”

T.S. Eliot book The Hollow Men

The Hollow Men (1925)

Death , Dreams , Star , Tree

“These modern productions are all very well,
But there's nothing to equal, from what I hear tell,
That moment of mystery
When I made history
As Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.”

T.S. Eliot book Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

Gus: The Theatre Cat
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)

History

“It is not the "greatness," the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.”

T.S. Eliot book Tradition and the Individual Talent

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

“Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us”

T.S. Eliot

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

“In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.”

T.S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)

Women

“Unreal city,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.”

T.S. Eliot book The Waste Land

Source: The Waste Land (1922), Line 60 et seq.

This is a reference to Dante's Inferno, Canto III, lines 55-57

Death , Winter

“Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen.”

T.S. Eliot

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

“When the day's hustle and bustle is done,
Then the Gumbie Cat's work is but hardly begun.”

T.S. Eliot book Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

The Old Gumbie Cat
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)

Cats

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

T.S. Eliot

Time (23 October 1950)

“I have given you the power of choice, and you only alternate
Between futile speculation and unconsidered action.”

T.S. Eliot

Choruses from The Rock (1934)

“Much to cast down, much to build, much to restore.”

T.S. Eliot

Choruses from The Rock (1934)

“And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls."”

T.S. Eliot

Choruses from The Rock (1934)

People

“Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
An old man in a draughty house
Under a windy knob.”

T.S. Eliot book Poems

"Gerontion"
Poems (1920)

Housing

“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
Way , Behavior , Reading

“What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal”

T.S. Eliot book The Waste Land

Source: The Waste Land (1922), Line 367 et seq.

Mountain , Maternity

“Then it seemed as if men must proceed from light to light, in the light of the Word,
Through the Passion and Sacrifice saved in spite of their negative being;
Bestial as always before, carnal, self seeking as always before, selfish and purblind as ever before,
Yet always struggling, always reaffirming, always resuming their march on the way that was lit by the light;
Often halting, loitering, straying, delaying, returning, yet following no other way.”

T.S. Eliot

Choruses from The Rock (1934)

Men , Way , Light , Passion

“No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job…. Poetry.. remains one person talking to another…. no poet can write a poem of amplitude unless he is the master of the prosaic.”

T.S. Eliot

The Music of Poetry (24 February 1942) the third W. P. Ker memorial lecture delivered in the University of Glasgow

Personality

“Let me show you the work of the humble. Listen.”

T.S. Eliot

Choruses from The Rock (1934)

“He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare:
At whatever time the deed took place-
Macavity wasn't there.”

T.S. Eliot book Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

Macavity: The Mystery Cat
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)

Time

“It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

T.S. Eliot

Dante (1929), a biographical essay

Communication

“O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It's so elegant
So intelligent”

T.S. Eliot book The Waste Land

Source: The Waste Land (1922), Line 128 et seq.

Intelligence

“Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.”

T.S. Eliot book Tradition and the Individual Talent

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Literature , Idea , Past

“A dangerous person to disagree with.”

T.S. Eliot

On Samuel Johnson in Homage to John Dryden: Three Essays on Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (1927)

Personality

“They say that all the Cats whose wicked deeds are widely known
(I might mention Mungojerrie, I might mention Griddlebone)
Are nothing more than agents for the Cat who all the time
Just controls their operations: the Napoleon of Crime!”

T.S. Eliot book Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

Macavity: The Mystery Cat
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)

Cats , Time

“This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks”

T.S. Eliot

Ash-Wednesday (1930)
Context: And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth
This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Dreams , Birth , Solitude , Time

“Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated And let my cry come unto Thee.”

T.S. Eliot

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

Sister , Suffering , Cry , Sea

“What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

T.S. Eliot book Tradition and the Individual Talent

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Personality

“Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
For he's a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity.
You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in the square —
But when a crime's discovered, then Macavity's not there!”

T.S. Eliot book Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

Macavity: The Mystery Cat
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)

“Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us — if at all — not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.”

T.S. Eliot book The Hollow Men

The Hollow Men (1925)

Death , Men , Soul

“so the countess passed on until she came through the little park, where Niobe presented her with a cabinet, and so departed.”

T.S. Eliot book Poems

"Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a cigar"
Poems (1920)

“And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor
Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance,
But all dash to and fro in motor cars,
Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.”

T.S. Eliot

Choruses from The Rock (1934)

Cars

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism.”

T.S. Eliot book Tradition and the Individual Talent

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Art , Dead

“In the vacant places
We will build with new bricks”

T.S. Eliot

Choruses from The Rock (1934)

“I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”

T.S. Eliot book The Waste Land

Source: The Waste Land (1922), Line 39 et seq.

Light , Silence , Heart , Dead

“The work of creation is never without travail”

T.S. Eliot

Choruses from The Rock (1934)