quotes by T.S. Eliot

"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."
— T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets)

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

"Humankind cannot bear very much reality"
— T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets)

"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."
— T.S. Eliot (Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: And Other Poems)

"I've measured out my life in coffee spoons."
— T.S. Eliot

"The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust."
— T.S. Eliot

"Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
"
— T.S. Eliot

"'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."
— T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land and Other Writings (Modern Library Classics))

"I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing."
— T.S. Eliot

"Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions."
— T.S. Eliot

"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."
— T.S. Eliot

"You are the music while the music lasts. "
— T.S. Eliot

"There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet."
— T.S. Eliot

"Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know."
— T.S. Eliot (Selected Essays)

"If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?"
— T.S. Eliot

""Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.""
— T.S. Eliot

"An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry. "
— T.S. Eliot

"Most editors are failed writers. But, then again, so are most writers."
— T.S. Eliot

""We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.""
— T.S. Eliot

"Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
"
— T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets)