T S Eliot quotes
- “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.” - “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
- “This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.” - “To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.”
- “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.” - “Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” - “Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.”
- “I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
- “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.”
- “April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.” - “The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man”
- “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.” - “Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”
- “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”
- “What is hell? 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.” - “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.” - “If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?”
- “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
- “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
- “There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” - “Books. Cats. Life is good.”
- “Unreal friendship may turn to real
But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended” - “Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow” - “You are the music while the music lasts.”
- “If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.”
- “We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion; - “Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.” - “Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.”
- “Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think; whatever you want, be sure that is what you want; whatever you feel, be sure that is what you feel.”
- “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.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
