T. S. Eliot
Quick now, here, now, always- A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.Collection: Fire
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.Collection: Art
Each way means loneliness -- and communion.Collection: Loneliness
Till Human voices wake us, and we drown.Collection: Voice
Trying to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.Collection: New Beginnings
No scheme for a change of society can be made to appear immediately palatable, except by falsehood, until society has become so desperate that it will accept any change.Collection: Class
A wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and that the consequence is an inevitable doom. For a long enough time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet.Collection: Attitude
There is no escape from metre; there is only mastery.Collection: Mastery
The rats are underneath the piles/ The Jew is underneath the lot.Collection: Rats
When a Cat adopts you, and I am not superstitious at all I don't mean only Black cats there is nothing to be done about it except to put up with it and wait until the wind changes.Collection: Cat
Before a cat will condescend to treat you as a trusted friend, some little token of esteem is needed, like a dish of cream.Collection: Cat
Because I know that time is always time And place is always and only place.Collection: Knows
Today, you're halfway to 100! Here's to optimism, whether it is realistic or not. Happy 50th birthday!Collection: Birthday
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.Collection: Thinking
It's harder to confess the sin that no one believes in Than the crime that everyone can appreciate. For the crime is in relation to the law And the sin is in relation to the sinner.Collection: Believe
And indeed there will be time To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?" Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair.Collection: Time
The nightingales are singing near The Convent of the Sacred Heart, And sang within the bloody wood When Agamemnon cried aloud, And let their liquid siftings fall To stain the stiff dishonored shroud.Collection: Fall
You must not on any account give me credit for being penetrating. I have impressed people that way before, and the result is always disaster.Collection: People
History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.Collection: Self
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; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at times, the Fool.Collection: Two
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? 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, I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid.Collection: Greatness
Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snowCollection: Winter
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.Collection: Struggle
Humankind can't stand too much reality.Collection: Teaching
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.Collection: Nature
Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin.Collection: Death
The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o'clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps.Collection: Lonely
And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices in the lost lilac and the lost sea voices and the weak spirit quickens to rebel for the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell quickens to recover.Collection: Heart
Poetry is a mug's game.Collection: Games
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?Collection: Strength
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.Collection: Evil
A philosophy can and must be worked out with the greatest rigour and discipline in the details, but can ultimately be founded on nothing but faith: and this is the reason, I suspect, why the novelties in philosophy are only in elaboration, and never in fundamentals.Collection: Faith
As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill.Collection: Stars
The end is where we start from.Collection: New Beginnings
Disillusion can become itself an illusion If we rest in it.Collection: Illusion
We do not pass twice through the same door Or return to the door through which we did not pass.Collection: Doors
If you want it you must obtain it by great labor.Collection: Basketball
The naming of cats is a difficult matter. It isn't just one of your holiday games. You may think at first I'm mad as a hatter. When I tell you a cat must have three different names.Collection: Holiday
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singingCollection: Singing
Any religion is forever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion.Collection: Inspirational
But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.Collection: Discipline
Every moment is a new and shocking transvaluation of all we have ever been.Collection: Moments
With a poem you can say 'I got my feeling into words for myself. I now have the equivalent in words for that much of what I have felt.'Collection: Feelings
Not less of love, but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the Future as well as the past.Collection: Love
We learn what poetry is - if we ever learn - by reading it.Collection: Reading