Quotes by Thomas Stearns Eliot
If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it."
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?
I must say Bernard Shaw is greatly improved by music.
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.
The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
At twenty you have many desires which hide the truth, but beyond forty there are only real and fragile truths -your abilities and your failings.
There is no method but to be very intelligent.
The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.
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.
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage which we did not take, towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.
Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.
Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
And we must think no further of you.
The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.
