Quotes from T. S. Eliot

Keeping time,Keeping the rhythm in their dancingAs in their living in the living seasonsThe time of the seasons and the constellationsThe time of milking and the time of harvestThe time of the coupling of man and womanAnd that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

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.

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

I'll convert you!Into a stew.A nice little, white little, missionary stew!

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.In order to arrive at what you do not knowYou must go by the way which is the way of ignorance.

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

And indeed there will be timeTo wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"

The houses are all gone under the sea.

Here is no water but only rock.

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.

All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths they become facts, or at best, part of the public character or at worst, catchwords.

There will be time to murder and create.

And the wind shall say Here were decent godless people. Their only monument the asphalt road. And a thousand lost golf balls.

Any religion...is for ever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion.

April is the cruellest month, breedingLilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory out of desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain.Winter kept us warm, coveringEarth in a forgetful snow, feedingA little life with dried tubers.

Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind.

Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to ...

Human kind cannot bear much reality.

Humankind cannot stand very much reality.

Laughter (humor) is the best medicine"!

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion…

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.

Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.