T. S. Eliot Quotes About Emotions

Quotes about: Emotions

• 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.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Mean, Expression

  The Sacred Wood "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1920)

• The majority of mankind is lazyminded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith.

  T. S. Eliot

  Vanity, Doubt, Majority

  Blaise Pascal, W. F. Trotter, T. S. Eliot (2003). “Pensees”, p.15, Courier Corporation

• We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

  T. S. Eliot

  Work, Book, Breathing

  T.S. Eliot (2010). “The Waste Land and Other Poems”, p.84, Broadview Press

• 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.

  T. S. Eliot

  Years, Different, Emotion

• Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, Falls the shadow.

  T. S. Eliot

  Fall, Philosophical, Shadow

  T.S. Eliot (2009). “Collected Poems 1909-1962”, p.76, Faber & Faber

• Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow Life is very long Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom For Thine is Life is For Thine is the This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

  T. S. Eliot

  Fall, Reality, Essence

  "The Hollow Men" l. 95 (1925)

• The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Facts, Events

  The Sacred Wood "Hamlet and His Problems" (1920).

• We must believe that "emotion recollected in tranquillity" is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not "recollected" and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is "tranquil" only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.

  T. S. Eliot

  Believe, Numbers, Atmosphere

  "Reading Prose: An Introduction to Critical Study". Book by T. S. Eliot (p. 505), 1952.

• Our emotions Are only “incidents” In the effort to keep day and night together.

  T. S. Eliot

  Night, Effort, Together

  T.S. Eliot (2011). “The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot”, p.184, Faber & Faber

• 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

  Feelings, Ordinary, Use

  T.S. Eliot (2015). “The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems”, p.953, Faber & Faber

• Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.

  T. S. Eliot

  Poetry, Personality, Individual Talent

  The Sacred Wood "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1920)

• Maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one's age, and with the same intensity as the emotions of youth.

  T. S. Eliot

  Mean, Men, Age

• Artistic inevitability lies in the complete adequacy of the external to the emotion.

  T. S. Eliot

  Lying, Adequacy, Emotion

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