Quotes from T.S. Eliot

The poem which is absolutely original is absolutely bad.

On his life between 1926-1927: like a bad Russian novel

Every moment is a fresh beginning

Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.

But poets more classical than they have the same essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind.

The wilderness is cracked and browned But through the water pale and thin Still shine the unoffending feet And there above the painter set   15 The Father and the Paraclete. .

In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden.

A people without religion will in the end find out that it has nothing to live for.

It seems that one ought to read in two ways: 1) because of a particular and personal interest, which makes the thing one's own, regardless of what other people think of the book 2) to a certain extent, because it is something one 'ought to have read' but one must be quite clear this why one is reading.

When you notice a cat in profound meditation, The reason, I tell you, is always the same: His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name.

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.

There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience. The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, For the pattern is new in every moment.

I tell you, it is not me you are looking at, Not me you are grinning at, not me your confidential looks Incriminate, but that other person, if person, You thought I was: let your necrophily Feed upon that carcase

Crains, dans le mur aveugle, un regard qui t'épie!

Men tighten the knot of confusion Into perfect misunderstanding, Reflecting a pocket-torch of observation Upon each other's opacity Neglecting all the admonitions From the world around the corner

Most editors are failed writers. But so are most writers

Harry: "I tell you, it is not me you are looking at, Not me you are grinning at, not me your confidential looks Incriminate, but that other person, if person, You thought I was: let your necrophily Feed upon that carcase

Yet we are here at Amy's command, to play an unread part in some monstrous farce, ridiculous in some nightmare pantomime.

A curse is like a child, formed To grow to maturity: Accident is design And design is accident In a cloud of unknowing.

To find a friend who has these qualities, Who has, and gives Those qualities upon which friendship lives.

Why should they wait until I came back to Wishwood? There were a thousand places where I might have met them! Why here? why here? Many happy returns of the day, mother.

Some of the verse of Tennyson shows immense technical skill, is better than anything of Shelley or Swinburne.43 I cite Tennyson's consummate skill to show that it is not merely a question of the slipshod, or of a degeneration of the ear. It is something deeper than that. It is a further stage in the disintegration of the intellect, the further separation of sound, image and thought.

You all of you try to talk as if nothing had happened, And yet you are talking of nothing else. Why not get to the point Or if you want to pretend that I am another person— A person that you have conspired to invent, please do so In my absence. I shall be less embarrassing to you. Agatha?

And I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat and snicker.