T. S. Eliot
Success is relative. It is what we make of the mess we have made of things.Collection: Success
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.Collection: Ignorance
The majority of mankind is lazyminded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith.Collection: Vanity
Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.Collection: Book
The role of art is not to express the personality but to overcome it.Collection: Art
My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. 'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak. 'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? 'I never know what you are thinking. Think.Collection: Night
Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats 5 Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question … 10 Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.Collection: Night
There is no such thing as a lost cause, because there is no such thing as a gained causeCollection: Causes
When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.Collection: Poetry
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us... and we drown.Collection: Girl
Art is the escape from personality.Collection: Art
i will show you fear in a handful of dust." t.s. eliot we don't actually fear death, we fear that no one will notice our absence, that we will disappear without a trace.Collection: Dust
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.Collection: Unique
All cases are unique and very similar to others.Collection: Unique
The fool,fixed in his folly,may think He can turn the wheel on which he turns.Collection: Life
Justice itself tends to be corrupted by political passion.Collection: Peace
Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake.Collection: Culture
Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it.Collection: Running
A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after - and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.Collection: Philosophy
These fragments I have shored against my ruinsCollection: Age
And indeed there will be time for the yellow smoke that slides along the street rubbing its back upon the window-panes; there will be time , there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; there will be time to murder and create, and time for all the works and days of hands that lift and drop a question on your plate; time for you and time for me, and time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of toast and tea.Collection: Hands
In a world of fugitives the one who stays home will seem to be running awayCollection: Running
He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience.Collection: Patience
And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you I will show you fear in a handful of dustCollection: Morning
I love reading another reader’s list of favorites. Even when I find I do not share their tastes or predilections, I am provoked to compare, contrast, and contradict. It is a most healthy exercise, and one altogether fruitful.Collection: Reading
He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate itCollection: Ideas
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.Collection: Care
To each individual the world will take on a different connotation of meaning-the important lies in the desire to search for an answer.Collection: Lying
A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything)Collection: Simplicity
A tradition without intelligence is not worth having.Collection: Tradition
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.Collection: Peace
It is not enough to understand what we ought to be, unless we know what we are; and we do not understand what we are, unless we know what we ought to be.Collection: Enough
Philosophy: a purple bullfinch in a lilac tree.Collection: Philosophy
time past and time future what might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.Collection: Time
No artist produces great art by a deliberate attempt to express his own personality.Collection: Art
Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has never happened before.Collection: Men
I suspect that in our loathing of totalitarianism, there is infused a good deal of admiration for its efficiency.Collection: Loathing
The sense of wellbeing! Its often with us When we are young, but then it's not noticed; And by the time one has grown to consciousness It comes less often.Collection: Health
Sand. Everywhere. In the bed, in the shower, all over the floor. Grrrrr.Collection: Bed
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.Collection: Phrases
Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative.Collection: Creative
For I have known them all already, known them all— Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.Collection: Morning
My name is only an anagram of toilets.Collection: Names
Humor is also a way of saying something serious.Collection: Funny
Survival is your strength not your shame.Collection: Survival
Unreal friendship may turn to real But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mendedCollection: Real