Quotes by Thomas Stearns Eliot
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.
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.
It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.
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.
If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.
Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.
A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.
There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.
Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.
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.
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?
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
This love is silent.
Business today consists in persuading crowds.
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
You are the music while the music lasts.
Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.
People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.
So the lover must struggle for words.
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.
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
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.
In my beginning is my end.
