Quotes from T. S. Eliot

In the last few years everything I'd done up to sixty or so has seemed very childish.

Maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one's age, and with the same intensity as the emotions of youth.

What have we given? My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment's surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed.

The great ages did not contain the best talent, they wasted less.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always asked to do things and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.

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.

Dear Mother, I am getting on nicely in my work at the bank, and like it ... I want to find out something about the science of money while I am at it; it is an extraordinarily interesting subject.

The work of creation is never without travail.

Art is the escape from personality.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel That questions the distempered part; Beneath the bleeding hands we feel The sharp compassion of the healer's art Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

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

If one has to earn a living, therefore, the safest occupation is that most remote from the arts.

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

When comparing works of art, it is important that the art itself, and not the artists, be considered.

It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the 'dear deceit' of beauty.

Today, you're halfway to 100! Here's to optimism, whether it is realistic or not. Happy 50th birthday!

All dash to and fro in motor cars. Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.

There is no method but to be very intelligent.

There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.

Should I after tea and cakes and ices have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

It takes so many years to learn that one is dead.

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

Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin.

Death has a hundred hands and walks by a thousand ways.