Quotes from T. S. Eliot

Accident is design / And design is accident / In a cloud of unknowing.

April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.

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

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

It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous. Resign yourself to be the fool you are... ...We must always take risks. That is our destiny.

We must always take risks. That is our destiny.

No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest. For it is part of education to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.

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

Everyone gets the experience. Some get the lesson.

We had the experience, but we missed the meaning.

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.

Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.

The majority of mankind is lazyminded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith.

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways.

Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison.

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

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.

And right action is freedom From past and future also.

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is incarnation. Here the impossible union of spheres of existence is actual. Here the past and future are conquered and reconciled.

The past and future / Are conquered, and reconciled.

If we really want to pray we must first learn to listen, for in the silence of the heart God speaks.