Thomas Stearns Eliot quotes

“Where is all the knowledge we lost with information? ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“In my beginning is my end. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“April is the cruellest month. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm, retreating to the corner of arm and knee, eager to be reassured, taking pleasure in the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree. ”

— Thomas Stearns 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. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“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. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“ So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“So the lover must struggle for words. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“ The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion. ”

— Thomas Stearns 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. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it." ”

— Thomas Stearns 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. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“Business today consists in persuading crowds. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature. ”

— Thomas Stearns 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. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot

“ It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves. ”

— Thomas Stearns Eliot