T. S. Eliot Quotes
An American-born English poet, dramatist and literary critic.
(1888 - 1965)
|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.
|
|
|
|
All cases are unique and very similar to others.
[Originality]
|
|
|
|
All our ignorance brings us closer to death.
|
|
|
|
All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords.
|
|
|
|
An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.
[Writers And Writing]
|
|
|
|
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
[Politics]
|
|
|
|
And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.
[Being]
|
|
|
|
Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.
[Anxiety]
|
|
|
|
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.
[Alter]
|
|
|
|
April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with Spring rain.
|
|
|
|
Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.
[Art]
|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks.
[Life]
|
|
|
|
Business today consists in persuading crowds.
|
|
|
|
Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmen.
|
|
|
|
Disillusion can become itself an illusion If we rest in it.
|
|
|
|
Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.
|
|
|
|
Every moment is a fresh beginning.
|
|
|
|
Genuine blasphemy, genuine in spirit and not purely verbal, is the product of partial belief, and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect Christian.
|
|
|
|
|