Quotes from T.S. Eliot

For what you call restoration to health Is only incubation of another malady.

We're all of us ill in one way or another: We call it health when we find no symptom Of illness. Health is a relative term.

For you can hardly fight anyone for very long without employing his weapons and using his methods; and to fight a man with ideas means adapting your ideas to his mind. Conflict is contact.

Nur diejenigen, die riskieren zu weit zu gehen, können überhaupt herausfinden, wie weit man gehen kann.

Believe me, Michael: Those who flee from the past will always lose the race. I know this from experience. When you reach your goal, Your imagined paradise of success and grandeur, You will find your past failures waiting there to greet you.

There is nothing at all to be done about it, There is nothing to do about anything.

My own Toryism is only intelligible on the understanding that there are no Tories in politics at all.

In a world of fugitives The person taking the opposite direction Will appear to run away.

I have all of the rightminded feeling about John That you consider appropriate. Only, that's not the language That I choose to be talking. I will not talk yours.

I think: it's strange how the old Can drop off to sleep in the middle of calamity Like children, or like hardened campaigners

We must try to penetrate the other private worlds Of make-believe and fear. To rest in our own suffering Is evasion of suffering. We must learn to suffer more.

If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable.

The life of a soul does not consist in the contemplation of one consistent world but in the painful task of unifying . . . jarring and incompatible ones, and passing, when possible, from two or more discordant viewpoints to a higher which shall somehow include and transmute them.

We had the experience but missed the meaning.

You can't understand me. It's not being alone That is the horror, to be alone with the horror. What matters is the filthiness. I can clean my skin, Purify my life, void my mind, But always the filthiness, that lies a little deeper . . .

What's the use of asking for an evening paper? You know as well as I do, at this distance from London Nobody's likely to have this evening's paper.

While trying to extricate his car from the collision, Mr. Piper reversed into a shop-window. When challenged, Mr. Piper said: "I thought it was all open country about here

In my time, these affairs were kept out of the papers; But nowadays, there's no such thing as privacy.

will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me, I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me. Let thy servant depart, Having seen thy salvation.

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 . . .

I am moved by fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing. — T.S. Eliot, from "Preludes," Prufrock and Other Observations . (Forgotten Books September 27, 2015) Originally published 1917.

In the next revolution of taste it is possible that poets may turn to the study of Dryden. He remains one of those who have set standards for English verse which it is desperate to ignore.

To be a 'ruined man' is itself a vocation.