Quotes from T. S. Eliot

When lovely woman stoops to folly andPaces about her room again, alone,She smooths her hair with automatic hand,And puts a record on the gramophone.

Upon the glazen shelves kept watchMatthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,The army of unalterable law.

Uncorseted, her friendly bustGives promise of pneumatic bliss.

Terminate tormentOf love unsatisfiedThe greater tormentOf love satisfied.

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 of that particular emotion.

The nightingales are singing nearThe Convent of the Sacred Heart,And sang within the bloody woodWhen Agamemnon cried aloud,And let their liquid siftings fallTo stain the stiff dishonored shroud.

And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon youWhich shall be the darkness of God.

Not fare well,But fare forward, voyagers.

I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.

RedeemThe time. RedeemThe unread vision in the higher dreamWhile jeweled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

Birth, and copulation, and death.That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks.

Who then devised the torment? Love.Love is the unfamiliar NameBehind the hands that woveThe intolerable shirt of flameWhich human power cannot remove.We only live, only suspireConsumed by either fire or fire.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow olderThe world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicatedOf dead and living. Not the intense momentIsolated, with no before and after,But a lifetime burning in every momentAnd not the lifetime of one man onlyBut of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.His powers of levitation would make a fakir stare,And when you reach the scene of the crime—Macavity's not there!

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestleWith words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.

And so each ventureIs a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulateWith shabby equipment always deterioratingIn the general mess of imprecision of feeling,Undisciplined squads of emotion.

I am aware of the damp souls of housemaidsSprouting despondently at area gates.

Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

He knew the anguish of the marrowThe ague of the skeleton;No contact possible to fleshAllayed the fever of the bone.

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.

Shape without form, shade without color,Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;Those who have crossedWith direct eyes, to death's other KingdomRemember us—if at all—not as lostViolent souls, but onlyAs the hollow menThe stuffed men.

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—Lean on a garden urn—Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

Dayadhvam: I have heard the keyTurn in the door once and turn once onlyWe think of the key, each in his prisonThinking of the key, each confirms a prison.

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.