T. S. Eliot
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap And seeing that it was a soft October night Curled once about the house, and fell asleepCollection: Fall
Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.Collection: Thinking
There will be time to murder and create.Collection: Time
When the gods know that a god hath fallen, With this kindly feeling They do encourage him-- Be thou a god again and again.Collection: God
From a purely external point of view there is no will; and to find will in any phenomenon requires a certain empathy; we observe aman's actions and place ourselves partly but not wholly in his position; or we act, and place ourselves partly in the position of an outsider.Collection: Views
One starts an action simply because one must do something.Collection: Action
Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the danceCollection: Inspirational
Gin and drugs, dear lady, gin and drugs.Collection: Drinking
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly But merely vans to beat the air The air which is now thoroughly small and dry Smaller and dryer than the will Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit stillCollection: Air
In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.Collection: Women
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.Collection: Coffee
Stand on the highest pavement of the stair- Lean on a garden urn- Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.Collection: Garden
It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London.Collection: New York
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless. The houses are all gone under the sea. The dancers are all gone under the hill.Collection: Humility
Human kind cannot bear much reality.Collection: Reality
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. Through the unknown, remembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple-tree Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea.Collection: Children
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not.Collection: Ignorance
A good deal of confusion could be avoided, if we refrained from setting before the group, what can be the aim only of the individual; and before society as a whole, what can be the aim only of the group.Collection: Confusion
The purpose of a Christian education would not be merely to make men and women pious Christians: a system which aimed too rigidly at this end alone would become only obscurantist. A Christian education must primarily teach people to be able to think in Christian categories.Collection: Graduation
Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation.Collection: Exaltation
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Appreciation
All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment.Collection: Art
I am moved by fancies that are curled, around these images and cling, the notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.Collection: Suffering
I've been born, and once is enough.Collection: Enough
Envy is everywhere. Who is without envy? And most people Are unaware or unashamed of being envious.Collection: People
In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession.Collection: Order
When war is not just it is subsequently justified; so it becomes many things. In reality, an unjust war is merely piracy. It consists of piracy, ego and, more than anything, money. War is our century's prostitution.Collection: War
The soul of Man must quicken to creation.Collection: Men
After such knowledge, what forgiveness?Collection: Forgiveness
Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.Collection: Cracks
For you know only a heap of broken imagesCollection: Broken
To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now.Collection: Believe
As we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated of dead and living.Collection: World
Old men ought to be explorers.Collection: Men
There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.Collection: Doors
Our emotions Are only “incidents” In the effort to keep day and night together.Collection: Night
So I find words I never thought to speak In streets I never thought I should revisit When I left my body on a distant shore.Collection: Body
The great ages did not contain the best talent, they wasted less.Collection: Age
Maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one's age, and with the same intensity as the emotions of youth.Collection: Mean
If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemableCollection: All Time
It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is a life.Collection: Life
No university ought to be merely a national institution....The universities should have their common ideals, they should have their common obligations toward each other. They should be independent of the governments of the countries in which they are situated. They should not be institutions for the training of an efficient bureaucracy, or for equipping scientists to get the better of foreign scientists; they should stand for the preservation of learning, for the pursuit of truth, and in so far as men are capable of it, the attainment of wisdom.Collection: Country
Only through time time is conqueredCollection: Quartets
The lot of man is ceaseless labor, Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder.Collection: Men
You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; They called me the hyacinth girl.' —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Od' und leer das Meer.Collection: Girl
I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones.Collection: Men
And all shall be well and/ All manner of thing shall be well/ By the purification of the motive/ In the ground of our beseechingCollection: Purification