T. S. Eliot Quotes

time past and time future
what might have been and what has been
point to one end, which is always present.

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.

"Poetry, if it is not to be a lifeless repetition of forms, must be constantly exploring "the frontiers of the spirit." But these frontiers are not like the surveys of geographical explorers, conquered once for all and settled. The frontiers of the spirit are more like the jungle which, unless continuously kept under control, is always ready to encroach and eventually obliterate the cultivated area."

If time and space, as sages say,
Are things which cannot be,
The sun which does not feel decay
No greater is than we.
So why, Love, should we ever pray
To live a century?
The butterfly that lives a day
Has lived eternity.

Yes the Rum Tum Tugger is a Curious Cat — And there isn't any call for me to shout it: For he will do As he do do And there's no doing anything about it!

Where the bricks are fallen We will build with new stone Where the beams are rotten We will build with new timbers Where the word is unspoken We will build with new speech There is work together A Church for all And a job for each Every man to his work.

We don't actually fear death, we fear that no one will notice our absence, that we will disappear without a trace.

Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow

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.

We are being made aware that the organisation of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may pay dearly. I need only mention, as an instance now very much before the public eye, the results of 'soil-erosion'—the exploitation of the earth, on a vast scale for two generations, for commercial profit: immediate benefits leading to dearth and desert.

Where is the Life we lost in living?

In the vacant places We will build with new bricks

Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

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. So how should I presume?