T. S. Eliot
Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.Collection: Graduation
It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.Collection: Space
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.Collection: Hope
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.Collection: Faith
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.Collection: Poetry
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.Collection: Poetry
Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.Collection: Art
I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.Collection: Death
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.Collection: Age
All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords.Collection: Best
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?Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: Experience
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.Collection: Fear
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.Collection: Christmas
I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.Collection: Religion
Business today consists in persuading crowds.Collection: Business
Home is where one starts from.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Time
Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?Collection: Knowledge
So the lover must struggle for words.Collection: Romantic
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.Collection: Business
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.Collection: Poetry
We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.Collection: Religion
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.Collection: Poetry
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.Collection: Poetry
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.Collection: Courage
You are the music while the music lasts.Collection: Music
There is no method but to be very intelligent.Collection: Intelligence
The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.Collection: Communication
This love is silent.Collection: Love
A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: Poetry
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.
April is the cruellest month.
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.
If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.
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.
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.
It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.
The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.
It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.
There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.
People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.
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.
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.