quotes from classic

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.

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So the lover must struggle for words.

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People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.

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Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.

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You are the music while the music lasts.

more quotes from Thomas Stearns Eliot

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

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Business today consists in persuading crowds.

more quotes from Thomas Stearns Eliot

This love is silent.

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Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

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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?

more quotes from Thomas Stearns Eliot

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.

more quotes from Thomas Stearns Eliot

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.

more quotes from Thomas Stearns Eliot

There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.

more quotes from Thomas Stearns Eliot

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.

more quotes from Thomas Stearns Eliot

Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.

more quotes from Thomas Stearns Eliot

My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.

more quotes from Thomas Stearns Eliot

If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?

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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.

more quotes from Thomas Stearns Eliot

It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.

more quotes from Thomas Stearns Eliot

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.

more quotes from Thomas Stearns Eliot