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Action(s)
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The awful daring of a moment's surrender which an age of prudence can never retract.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Age
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The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always asked to do things, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Art
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The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Authors & Writing
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An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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I suppose some editors are failed writers; but so are most writers.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, "New York Post", September 22, 1963
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Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Baby, Babies
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Books
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Communication
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Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Consequences
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Criticism
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Culture
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In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Dance, Dancing
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I said to my soul
Be still
And wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing
And wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing
There is yet faith
But the faith and the hope and the love
Are all in the waiting
And do not think
For you are not ready for thought
So the darkness shall be the light
And the stillness
The dancing
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, Four Quartets
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Death
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Decisions
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In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Discovery
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, Little Gidding (from the last of his Four Quartets)
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Emotions
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Our emotions are only incidents in the effort to keep day and night together.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Endings
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What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, "Four Quartets"
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Evil
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Fashion
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Fear
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I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, Though I have seen my head grown slightly bald brought in upon a platter,
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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, Excerpted from: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
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Food
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Freedom
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Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Friends
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Friendship should be more than biting time can sever.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Futility
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Goodness
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The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Guilt
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In the small circle of pain within the skull
You still shall tramp and tread one endless round
Of thought, to justify your action to yourselves,
Weaving a fiction which unravels as you weave,
Pacing forever in the hell of make-believe
Which never is belief: this is your fate on earth
And we must think no further of you.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, pt. 2 (1935)
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Hell
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Information
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Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Innovation
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All cases are unique and very similar to others.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Insanity
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Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Journeys
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Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, (widely attributed to Emerson, possibly 'anonymous')
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Leadership
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People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Life
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The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to the brass tacks.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Literary
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This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, Hollow Men, The
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Love
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Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, "Four Quartets"
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Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Martyr, Martyrdom
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Music
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You are the music while the music lasts.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Past, the
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Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Peace
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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People
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What we know of other people's only our memory of the moments during which we knew them.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Poetry
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When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry --That is a life.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the relation of criticism to poetry in England (London: Faber and Faber, 1933, 1959), 130
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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 from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, Philip Massinger (essay)
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Power
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If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, you must accept the terms it offers you.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Pride
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Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Reality
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Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, from Burnt Norton (No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')
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Revolution
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It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Science
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There is no method but to be very intelligent.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Seasons
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April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory out of desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in a forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, Waste Land, The
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Success & Failure
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Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Television
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Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Tradition
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It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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A tradition without intelligence is not worth having.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Tyranny
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Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by terror and force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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War
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War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Words
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For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Worth
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Youth
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The young feel tired at the end of an action, the old at the beginning.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Books by and about TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
