T. S. Eliot Quotes - Page 10

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• The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in the end it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it. At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means?

  T. S. Eliot

  Mean, Rivers, Environmental

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• Tradition: how the vitality of the past enriches the life of the present.

  T. S. Eliot

  Healing, Past, Vitality

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• Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats 5 Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question … 10 Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.

  T. S. Eliot

  Night, Oysters, Talking

  "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" l. 13 (1917)

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• The only hope, or else despair
  Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre -
  To be redeemed from fire by fire.

  T. S. Eliot

  Hope, Lying, Fire

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950”, p.153, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• If one has to earn a living, therefore, the safest occupation is that most remote from the arts.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Occupation, Ifs

  Eliot, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Professor T S Eliot (2011). “Letters of T. S. Eliot: 1898-1922”, p.490, Yale University Press

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• When war is not just it is subsequently justified; so it becomes many things. In reality, an unjust war is merely piracy. It consists of piracy, ego and, more than anything, money. War is our century's prostitution.

  T. S. Eliot

  War, Reality, Ego

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• A people without history
  Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
  Of timeless moments.

  T. S. Eliot

  Time, People, Patterns

  Little Gidding (1942) pt. 5

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• Hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

  T. S. Eliot

  Hell, Always Alone, Figures

  The Cocktail Party act 1, sc. 3 (1950)

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• Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair-

  T. S. Eliot

  Hair, Pavement, Sunlight

  "La Figlia Che Piange" l. 3 (1917)

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• In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession.

  T. S. Eliot

  Order, Way, Quartets

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950”, p.136, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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)

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

  T. S. Eliot

  Blood, Theatre, Producers

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• Old men ought to be explorers.

  T. S. Eliot

  Men, Old Man, Explorers

  Four Quartets "East Coker" pt. 5 (1940)

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• There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.

  T. S. Eliot

  Doors, May, Way

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950”, p.113, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.

  T. S. Eliot

  Book, Said, Knows

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

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• 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

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• The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.

  T. S. Eliot

  Unique, Feelings, Immature

  "Essays on Elizabethan Drama".

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• 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

  Life, Men, Might

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• No university ought to be merely a national institution....The universities should have their common ideals, they should have their common obligations toward each other. They should be independent of the governments of the countries in which they are situated. They should not be institutions for the training of an efficient bureaucracy, or for equipping scientists to get the better of foreign scientists; they should stand for the preservation of learning, for the pursuit of truth, and in so far as men are capable of it, the attainment of wisdom.

  T. S. Eliot

  Country, Independent, Men

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• History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

  T. S. Eliot

  Self, May, Patterns

  T.S. Eliot (2009). “Collected Poems 1909-1962”, p.180, Faber & Faber

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• For you know only a heap of broken images

  T. S. Eliot

  Broken, Broken Images, Knows

  The Waste Land l. 21 (1922)

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• The soul of Man must quicken to creation.

  T. S. Eliot

  Men, Soul, Creation

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950”, p.120, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Envy is everywhere. Who is without envy? And most people Are unaware or unashamed of being envious.

  T. S. Eliot

  People, Envy, Envious

  T.S. Eliot (2013). “The Elder Statesman”, p.12, Faber & Faber

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• When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.

  T. S. Eliot

  Poetry, Done, Certain

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Notes towards the Definition of Culture”, p.119, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• It is not enough to understand what we ought to be, unless we know what we are; and we do not understand what we are, unless we know what we ought to be.

  T. S. Eliot

  Enough, Ought, Knows

  T.S. Eliot (1950). “Selected Essays”

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