69 Quotes & Sayings By T S Eliot

T. S. Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, on 26th October 1888. He was educated at St Paul's School, Concord, New Hampshire (1898-1903), the preparatory department of Harvard (1903-1908), and Harvard (1908-1909) Read more

During the First World War he was in the US Army in France. After leaving Harvard in 1908 he became a freelance writer, writing for American magazines and newspapers. He went to Paris in 1914 with his younger brother Richard and their friend Ezra Pound, wrote some poems there, and returned to England in 1915 to edit Poetry magazine.

He contributed to The Egoist Review, The Little Review, The Criterion, The Filling Station (a literary review edited by Pound), and Four Seas (a periodical of Italian literature). In 1916 he married another poet Dorothy Shakespear whom he had met during the war. During the 1920s Eliot became increasingly dissatisfied with modern poetry and withdrew into himself.

He published little during this time but published two volumes of essays: "The Sacred Wood" (1920), an attack on modern poetry; and " Prufrock and Other Observations" (1922), a collection of prose pieces based on notes left behind by his dead brother. He also published several books on symbolism: "The Use of Poetry & the Use of Criticism" (1920), "The Sacred Wood" (1920), "Ash Wednesday" (1929), "Four Quartets" (1935), which are widely regarded as his greatest work; they are composed of four poems--"Burnt Norton," "East Coker," "Little Gidding," and "Death by Water." He also wrote two spy novels set in Nazi Germany: "Nightfall" (1937) and "Enemy of the Stars" (1940). In 1933 he became a professor at Cambridge University.

1
How wild it was, to let it be. T. S. Eliot
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We understand the ordinary business of living, We know how to work the machine T. S. Eliot
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You are not here to verify, instruct yourself, or inform curiosityor carry report. You are here to kneelwhere prayer has been valid. And prayer is more than an order of words, the conscious occupation of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying. T. S. Eliot
4
A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance. T. S. Eliot
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It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored in climate that seem to me the happiest but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both. T. S. 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. T. S. Eliot
7
The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible. T. S. Eliot
8
The young feel tired at the end of an action The old at the beginning. T. S. Eliot
9
In the last few years everything I'd done up to sixty or so has seemed very childish. T. S. Eliot
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You have now learned to see That cats are much like you and me And other people whom we find Possessed of various types of mind. T. S. Eliot
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To do the useful thing to say the courageous thing to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life. T. S. Eliot
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In my beginning is my end. T. S. Eliot
13
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. T. S. Eliot
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What is actual is actual only for one time. And only for one place. T. S. Eliot
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What is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place. T. S. Eliot
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This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. T. S. Eliot
17
Genuine blasphemy genuine in spirit and not purely verbal is the product of partial belief and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect Christian. T. S. Eliot
18
Should I after tea and cakes and ices have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? T. S. Eliot
19
What we call the beginning is often an end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. T. S. Eliot
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No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest. For it is part of education to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude. T. S. Eliot
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It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us to escape not from our own time - for we are bound by that - but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time. T. S. Eliot
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I will show you fear in a handful of dust. T. S. Eliot
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Poetry is a mug's game. T. S. Eliot
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One starts an action simply because one must do something. T. S. Eliot
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Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important. T. S. Eliot
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The historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence. T. S. Eliot
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I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. T. S. Eliot
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Birth copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks. T. S. Eliot
29
It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored climate that seem to me the happiest but those in which a long stroke of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both. T. S. Eliot
30
All cases are unique and very similar to others. T. S. Eliot
31
Philosophy - the purple bullfinch in the lilac tree. T. S. Eliot
32
When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences. T. S. Eliot
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When a great poet has lived certain things have been done once for all and cannot be achieved again. T. S. Eliot
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No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. T. S. Eliot
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The poet's mind is ... 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. T. S. Eliot
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People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced. T. S. Eliot
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Human kind cannot bear very much reality. T. S. Eliot
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The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity sluggish and indomitable as a glacier will mitigate the most violent and depress the most exalted revolution. T. S. Eliot
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Success is relative: It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things. T. S. Eliot
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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
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April is the crudest month breeding Lilacs out of the dead land mixing Memory and desire stirring Dull roots with spring rain. T. S. Eliot
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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. T. S. Eliot
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I suppose some editors are failed writers - but so are most writers. T. S. Eliot
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An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better a little better. T. S. Eliot
45
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. T. S. Eliot
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Business today consists in persuading crowds. T. S. Eliot
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I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing. T. S. Eliot
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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
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This love is silent. T. S. Eliot
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The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. T. S. Eliot
51
It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves. T. S. Eliot
52
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
53
Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know. T. S. Eliot
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I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different. T. S. Eliot
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You are the music while the music lasts. T. S. 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. T. S. Eliot
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There is no method but to be very intelligent. T. S. Eliot
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I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics. T. S. Eliot
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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. T. S. Eliot
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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. T. S. Eliot
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Where is all the knowledge we lost with information? T. S. Eliot
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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? T. S. Eliot
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So the lover must struggle for words. T. S. Eliot
64
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 who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. T. S. Eliot
65
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. T. S. Eliot
66
Immature poets imitate mature poets steal. T. S. Eliot
67
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly. T. S. Eliot
68
Home is where one starts from. T. S. Eliot