Quotes from T. S. Eliot

Philosophy - the purple bullfinch in the lilac tree.

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is a life.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

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

Poetry is not an assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.

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.

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

If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.

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.

When a great poet has lived certain things have been done once for all and cannot be achieved again.

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

It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.

O father, father Gone from us, lost to us, The church lies bereft, Alone, Desecrated, desolated. And the heathen shall build On the ruins Their world without God. I see it. I see it.

When the gods know that a god hath fallen, With this kindly feeling They do encourage him-- Be thou a god again and again.

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable.

Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has never happened before.

The hippopotamus's day Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts; God works in a mysterious way- The Church can sleep and feed at once.

Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmen.

It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good.

No artist produces great art by a deliberate attempt to express his own personality.

Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues.