110+ T. S. Eliot Quotes On Death, Time And Poetry

T. S. Eliot was an American-born British poet, playwright and literary critic. He is considered one of the 20th century's major poets and is often regarded as one of the most influential poets of the modernist movement. His most famous poem, The Waste Land, is considered to be one of the most important works of English literature of the 20th century. Following is our collection on famous quotes by T. S. Eliot on death, love, life.

Top 10 T. S. Eliot Quotes

1. Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
2. Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
3. If we really want to pray we must first learn to listen, for in the silence of the heart God speaks.
4. 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.
5. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
6. Finding a way to live the simple life is one of life's supreme complications.
7. April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.
8. Now that the lilacs are in bloom She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
9. Survival is your strength not your shame.
10. To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.

T. S. Eliot Image Quotes

Survival is your strength not your shame. — T. S. Eliot

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. — T. S. Eliot

Distracted from distraction by distraction — T. S. Eliot

You are the music while the music lasts. — T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot Short Quotes

• We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together...
• The True Church can never fail. For it is based upon a rock.
• So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
• You are the music while the music lasts.
• Distracted from distraction by distraction
• Philosophy: a purple bullfinch in a lilac tree.
• The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways.
• My name is only an anagram of toilets.
• In the mountains, there you feel free.
• Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.

T. S. Eliot Quotes About Death

Shape without form, shade without color, Paralyzed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom Remember us-if at all-not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men. — T. S. Eliot

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different. — T. S. Eliot

There are flood and drought over the eyes and in the mouth, dead water and dead sand contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil gapes at the vanity of toil, laughs without mirth. This is the death of the earth. — T. S. Eliot

It is worth while dying, to find out what life is. — T. S. Eliot

I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. — T. S. Eliot

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. — T. S. Eliot

I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me, I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me. — T. S. Eliot

My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand. — T. S. Eliot

It takes so many years to learn that one is dead. — T. S. Eliot

I believe the moment of birth Is when we have knowledge of death I believe the season of birth Is the season of sacrifice. — T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot Quotes About Love

The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started. — T. S. Eliot

Not less of love, but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the Future as well as the past. — T. S. Eliot

Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden. — T. S. Eliot

There's no vocabulary For love within a family, love that's lived in But not looked at, love within the light of which All else is seen, the love within which All other love finds speech. This love is silent. — T. S. Eliot

I love reading another reader’s list of favorites. Even when I find I do not share their tastes or predilections, I am provoked to compare, contrast, and contradict. It is a most healthy exercise, and one altogether fruitful. — T. S. Eliot

Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter. — T. S. Eliot

Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove. — T. S. Eliot

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. — T. S. Eliot

When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smooths her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone. — T. S. Eliot

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. — T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot Quotes About Life

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. — T. S. Eliot

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. — T. S. Eliot

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music. — T. S. Eliot

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry. — T. S. Eliot

If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, you must accept the terms it offers you. — T. S. Eliot

The end is where we start from. — T. S. Eliot

life is long between the desire and the spasm. — T. S. Eliot

These fragments I have shored against my ruins — T. S. Eliot

War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted. — T. S. Eliot

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying. — T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot Quotes About Time

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. — T. S. Eliot

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves. — T. S. Eliot

Nothing pleases people more than to go on thinking what they have always thought, and at the same time imagine that they are thinking something new and daring: it combines the advantage of security and the delight of adventure. — T. S. Eliot

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. — T. S. Eliot

It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape, not from our own time - for we are bound by that - but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time. — T. S. Eliot

At the beach - time you enjoyed wasting, is not wasted. — T. S. Eliot

Time past and time future allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time. — T. S. Eliot

What is true, is true only for one time and only for one place. — T. S. Eliot

No place of grace for those who avoid the Face. No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the Voice. — T. S. Eliot

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

T. S. Eliot Quotes About Poetry

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. — T. S. Eliot

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

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. — T. S. Eliot

The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together. — T. S. Eliot

Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. — T. S. Eliot

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion. — T. S. Eliot

I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling. — T. S. Eliot

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly. — T. S. Eliot

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

All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment. — T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot Quotes About Writing

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers. — T. S. Eliot

If you start with a bang, you won't end with a whimper. — T. S. Eliot

And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness. — T. S. Eliot

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better. — T. S. Eliot

The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible. — T. S. Eliot

Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it. — T. S. Eliot

I suppose some editors are failed writers; but so are most writers. — T. S. Eliot

The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. — T. S. Eliot

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. — T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot Quotes About Philosophical

Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, Falls the shadow. — T. S. Eliot

Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self. — T. S. Eliot

And right action is freedom From past and future also. — T. S. Eliot

A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after - and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys. — T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot Quotes About World

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is. — T. S. Eliot

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper. — T. S. Eliot

Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions. — T. S. Eliot

Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them. — T. S. Eliot

Our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and of our visible, sensible world. — T. S. Eliot

Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair. — T. S. Eliot

When the whole world is running headlong towards the precipice, one who walks in the opposite direction is looked at as being crazy. — T. S. Eliot

Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall My buried life, and Paris in the spring, I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world To be wonderful and youthful afterall — T. S. Eliot

To each individual the world will take on a different connotation of meaning-the important lies in the desire to search for an answer. — T. S. Eliot

O father, father Gone from us, lost to us, The church lies bereft, Alone, Desecrated, desolated. And the heathen shall build On the ruins Their world without God. I see it. I see it. — T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot Quotes About People

What we know of other people's only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. — T. S. Eliot

People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced. — T. S. Eliot

Here were decent godless people; Their only monument the asphalt road And a thousand lost golf balls. — T. S. Eliot

I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls ... Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead. — T. S. Eliot

Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome. — T. S. Eliot

Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past Into different lives, or into any future; You are not the same people who left that station Or who will arrive at any terminus, While the narrowing rails slide together behind you. — T. S. Eliot

The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely. — T. S. Eliot

That meddling in other people's affairs...formerly conducted by the most discreet intrigue is now openly advocated under the name of intervention. — T. S. Eliot

People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events. — T. S. Eliot

The purpose of a Christian education would not be merely to make men and women pious Christians: a system which aimed too rigidly at this end alone would become only obscurantist. A Christian education must primarily teach people to be able to think in Christian categories. — T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot Quotes About Poet

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. — T. S. Eliot

Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult...The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning. — T. S. Eliot

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. — T. S. Eliot

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. — T. S. Eliot

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

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

Good poets borrow, great poets steal — T. S. Eliot

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. — T. S. Eliot

A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. — T. S. Eliot

Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language. — T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot Quotes About Beginning

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. — T. S. Eliot

Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste and end by debauching it. — T. S. Eliot

And the end and the beginning were always there Before the beginning and after the end. — T. S. Eliot

Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling. — T. S. Eliot

The young feel tired at the end of an action, the old at the beginning. — T. S. Eliot

Every moment is a fresh beginning. — T. S. Eliot

In my beginning is my end. — T. S. Eliot

The end is in the beginning. — T. S. Eliot

Every end is a beginning...And every beginning is an end. — T. S. Eliot

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph. — T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — T. S. Eliot

The tendency of liberals is to create bodies of men and women-of all classes-detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion-mob rule. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined. — T. S. Eliot

Survival is your strength not your shame. — T. S. Eliot

For most of us, there is only the unattended Moment, the moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts — T. S. Eliot

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

It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words. — T. S. Eliot

Shall I part my hair behind Do I dare to eat a peach I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. — T. S. Eliot

You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; They called me the hyacinth girl.' —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Od' und leer das Meer. — T. S. Eliot

Distracted from distraction by distraction — T. S. Eliot

You are the music while the music lasts. — T. S. Eliot

When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way. — T. S. Eliot

The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man — T. S. Eliot

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. — T. S. Eliot

A national culture, if it is to flourish, should be a constellation of cultures, the constitutes of which, benefiting each other, benefit the whole. — T. S. Eliot

In a mind charged with an eager purpose and an unfinished vindictiveness, there is no room for new feelings. — T. S. Eliot

Gin and drugs, dear lady, gin and drugs. — T. S. Eliot

Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment. — T. S. Eliot

It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind. — T. S. Eliot

In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing — T. S. Eliot

We can at least try to understand our own motives, passions, and prejudices, so as to be conscious of what we are doing when we apeal to those of others. This is very difficult, because our own prejudice and emotional bias always seems to us so rational. — T. S. Eliot

music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts. — T. S. Eliot

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity. — T. S. Eliot

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing. — T. S. Eliot

Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it. — T. S. Eliot

The darkness declares the glory of light. — T. S. Eliot

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky — T. S. Eliot

Accident is design / And design is accident / In a cloud of unknowing. — T. S. Eliot

Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other Who think the same thoughts without need of speech — T. S. Eliot

The naming of cats is a difficult matter. It isn't just one of your holiday games. You may think at first I'm mad as a hatter. When I tell you a cat must have three different names. — T. S. Eliot

A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance. — T. S. Eliot

So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist. — T. S. Eliot

What is this self-inside us, this silent observer, severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us, and urge us onto futile activity, and in the end, judge us still more severely for the errors into which his own reproaches drove us? — T. S. Eliot

If you want it you must obtain it by great labor. — T. S. Eliot

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information. — T. S. Eliot

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? — T. S. Eliot

Before a cat will condescend to treat you as a trusted friend, some little token of esteem is needed, like a dish of cream. — T. S. Eliot

Home is where one starts from. — T. S. Eliot

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. — T. S. Eliot

And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you I will show you fear in a handful of dust — T. S. Eliot

But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things. — T. S. Eliot

The old should be explorers, be curious, risk transgression, explore oldness itself. — T. S. Eliot

O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. — T. S. Eliot

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

Humankind cannot bear very much reality. — T. S. Eliot

It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the 'dear deceit' of beauty. — T. S. Eliot

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? — T. S. Eliot

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first. — T. S. Eliot

Cling, swing, Spring, sing, Swing up into the apple tree. — T. S. Eliot

No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest- for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude. — T. S. Eliot

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues. — T. S. Eliot

Life Lessons by T. S. Eliot

1. T. S. Eliot's poetry encourages us to appreciate the beauty of life's moments, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant. He also encourages us to embrace our own individual identity, to be true to ourselves and to strive for personal growth and development. Finally, Eliot encourages us to be mindful of our actions and to strive for a greater understanding of the world around us.