Quotes from T. S. Eliot

Can we only love Something created in our own imaginations?

The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.

And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started.

Philosophy: a purple bullfinch in a lilac tree.

Cling, swing, Spring, sing, Swing up into the apple tree.

Think neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

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.

The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

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.

To justify Christian morality because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us... and we drown.

We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.

This love is silent.

You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; They called me the hyacinth girl.' —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Od' und leer das Meer.

Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance

If we all were judged according to the consequences Of all our words and deeds, beyond the intention And beyond our limited understanding Of ourselves and others, we should all be condemned.

My mind may be American but my heart is British.

Hell is oneself, Hell is alone.

To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now.

Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment.