T.S. Eliot poetic quotes, aphorisms, sentences, definitions, criticisms and ideas that have a great poetic and literary meaning chosen from his various works.
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.
T. S. Eliot
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
T.S. Eliot
First Priest: But again, is it war or peace? Messenger: Peace, but not the kiss of peace.
T.S. Eliot
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.
T.S. Eliot
April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.
T.S. Eliot
No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job…. Poetry.. remains one person talking to another…. no poet can write a poem of amplitude unless he is the master of the prosaic.
T.S. Eliot
When a Cat adopts you there is nothing to be done about it except to put up with it until the wind changes.
T.S. Eliot
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes.
T.S. Eliot
We see the light but see not whence it comes. O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!
T.S. Eliot
In the uncertain hour before the morning Near the ending of interminable night At the recurrent end of the unending After the dark dove with the flickering tongue Had passed below the horizon of his homing.
T.S. Eliot
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, Undisciplined squads of emotion.
T.S. Eliot
The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.
T.S. Eliot
The man who returns will have to meet The boy who left.
T.S. Eliot
These modern productions are all very well, But there’s nothing to equal, from what I hear tell, That moment of mystery When I made history As Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.
T.S. Eliot
There are several symptoms Which must occur together, and to a marked degree, To qualify a patient for my sanatorium: And one of them is an honest mind. That is one of the causes of their suffering.
T.S. Eliot
In spite of all the dishonour, the broken standards, the broken lives, The broken faith in one place or another, There was something left that was more than the tales Of old men on winter evenings.
T.S. Eliot
Ash on an old man’s sleeve Is all the ash the burnt roses leave. Dust in the air suspended Marks the place where a story ended. Dust inbreathed was a house – The wall, the wainscot and the mouse The death of hope and despair, This is the death of air.
T.S. Eliot
Unreal city, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.
T.S. Eliot
Keeping time, Keeping the rhythm in their dancing As in their living in the living seasons The time of the seasons and the constellations The time of milking and the time of harvest The time of the coupling of man and woman And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling. Eating and drinking. Dung and death.
T.S. Eliot
Let these words answer For what is done, not to be done again May the judgement not be too heavy upon us
T.S. Eliot
In life there is not time to grieve long But this, this is out of life, this is out of time, An instant eternity of evil and wrong.
T.S. Eliot
The hippopotamus’s day Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts; God works in a mysterious way – The Church can sleep and feed at once.
T.S. Eliot
Wavering between the profit and the loss In this brief transit where the dreams cross The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying.
T.S. Eliot
And what the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
T.S. Eliot
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards.
T.S. Eliot
He is every bit as sane as you or I, He sees the world as clearly as you or I see it, It is only that he has seen a great deal more than that.
T.S. Eliot
Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws? She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.
T.S. Eliot
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.
T.S. Eliot
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of children in the foliage Quick now, here, now, always – Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after.
T.S. Eliot
We can say of Shakespeare, that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.
T.S. Eliot
We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
T.S. Eliot
I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare.
T.S. Eliot
Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.
T.S. Eliot
And Shakespeare himself takes liberties which only his genius justifies; liberties which Dante, with an equal genius, does not take. To pass on to posterity one’s own language, more highly developed, more refined, and more precise than it was before one wrote it, that is the highest possible achievement of the poet as poet.
T.S. Eliot
To be truly great poets it is not enough to have language and vision; it is also necessary to possess a great philosophical and/or theological system, which Shakespeare lacked and Dante did not.
T.S. Eliot
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.
T.S. Eliot
I gotta use words when I talk to you But if you understand or if you don’t That’s nothing to me and nothing to you.
T.S. Eliot
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
T.S. Eliot
In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.
T.S. Eliot
Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall My buried life, and Paris in the spring, I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world To be wonderful and youthful after all.
T.S. Eliot
I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
T.S. Eliot
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
T.S. Eliot
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
T.S. Eliot
A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.
T.S. Eliot
Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. Old men ought to be explorers Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
T.S. Eliot
Think not forever of yourselves, O Chiefs, nor of your own generation. Think of continuing generations of our families, think of our grandchildren and of those yet unborn, whose faces are coming from beneath the ground.
T.S. Eliot
There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing, No end to the withering of withered flowers.
T.S. Eliot
We can say of Shakespeare, that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.
T.S. Eliot
It seems just possible that a poem might happen To a very young man: but a poem is not poetry – That is a life.
T.S. Eliot
Our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and of our visible, sensible world.
T.S. Eliot
To rest in your own suffering Is evasion of suffering. We must learn to suffer more.
T.S. Eliot
All things become less real, man passes From unreality to unreality.
T.S. Eliot
The death of hope and despair, This is the death of air.
T.S. Eliot
My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand.
T.S. Eliot
Garlic and sapphires in the mud Clot the bedded axle-tree. The trilling wire in the blood Sings below inveterate scars And reconciles forgotten wars.
T.S. Eliot
In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur and faeces, Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
T.S. Eliot
There are flood and drought over the eyes and in the mouth, dead water and dead sand contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil gapes at the vanity of toil, laughs without mirth. This is the death of the earth.
T.S. Eliot
When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.
T.S. Eliot
Any man has to, needs to, wants to Once in a lifetime, do a girl in.
T.S. Eliot
Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.
T.S. Eliot
It is not the “greatness,” the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.
T.S. Eliot
When the day’s hustle and bustle is done, Then the Gumbie Cat’s work is but hardly begun.
T.S. Eliot
What have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards in an age which advances progressively backwards?
T.S. Eliot
I am glad you have a Cat, but I do not believe it is So remarkable a cat as My Cat. My Cat is a Lilliecat Hubvously. What a lilliecat it is. There never was such a Lilliecat. Its Name is JELLYORUM and its one Idea is to be Usefull!!
T.S. Eliot
Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger. Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.
T.S. Eliot
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.
T.S. Eliot
The Rum Turn Tugger is a terrible bore: When you let him in, then he wants to be out; He’s always on the wrong side of every door, And as soon as he’s at home, then he’d like to get about.
T.S. Eliot
In the vacant places We will build with new bricks
T.S. Eliot
If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.
T.S. Eliot
The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions.
T.S. Eliot
The endless cycle of idea and action, / Endless invention, endless experiment, / Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; / Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; / Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.
T.S. Eliot
A woman drew her long black hair out tight, And fiddled whisper music on those strings, And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings, And crawled head downward down a blackened wall.
T.S. Eliot
Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult… The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning.
T.S. Eliot
When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience – in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.
T.S. Eliot
Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.
T. S. Eliot
We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
T.S. Eliot
Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
T.S. Eliot
He knew the anguish of the marrow The ague of the skeleton; No contact possible to flesh Allayed the fever of the bone.
T.S. Eliot
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 infolded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.
T. S. Eliot
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice.
T.S. Eliot
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids Sprouting despondently at area gates.
T.S. Eliot
Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. For I have known them all already, known them all: – Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room.
T. S. Eliot
Clear the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! take the stone from stone, take the skin from the arm, take the muscle from bone, and wash them.
T.S. Eliot
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only The wind will listen.
T.S. Eliot
It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T.S. Eliot
Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree In the cool of the day.
T.S. Eliot
I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.
T.S. Eliot
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me, I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
T.S. Eliot
Much to cast down, much to build, much to restore.
T.S. Eliot
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.
T.S. Eliot
The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.
T.S. Eliot
O Light Invisible, we praise Thee! Too bright for mortal vision.
T.S. Eliot
Speech impelled us To purify the dialect of the tribe And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight.
T.S. Eliot
Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other Who think the same thoughts without need of speech
T.S. Eliot
The great poet, in writing himself, writes his time.
T.S. Eliot
The eastern light our spires touch at morning, The light that slants upon our western doors at evening, The twilight over stagnant pools at batflight, Moon light and star light, owl and moth light, Glow-worm glowlight on a grassblade. O Light Invisible, we worship Thee!
T.S. Eliot
God is leaving us, God is leaving us, more pang, more pain, than birth or death.
T.S. Eliot
I’ll convert you! Into a stew. A nice little, white little, missionary stew!
T.S. Eliot
Two live as one One live as two Two live as three Under the bam Under the boo Under the bamboo tree.
T.S. Eliot
To country people Cows are mild, And flee from any stick they throw; But I’m a timid town bred child, And all the cattle seem to know.
T.S. Eliot
In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light. We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and ecstasy is too much pain.
T.S. Eliot
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T.S. Eliot quotes and aphorisms
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Aforismi e citazioni di T.S. Eliot
