T.S. Eliot Quotes

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

The naming of cats is a difficult matter. It isn't just one of your holiday games. You may think at first I'm mad as a hatter. When I tell you a cat must have three different names.

When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom, the work is likely to sprawl.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

Stick with your own perception of yourself-living in your own world-and letting your reality, not the reality presented by other people or particular situations, control your performance.

Every moment is a fresh beginning.

Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject.

Home is where one starts from.

A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.

My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.

History repeats itself.

If you want it you must obtain it by great labor.

And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.

One has to spend many years in learning how to be happy.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.

Our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and of our visible, sensible world.

To become what you are not, behave as you do not.

It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape, not from our own time - for we are bound by that - but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.

My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.

Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow

Producing quality compost is the most important job on the organic farm. A lot of the problems I see on farms I visit could be solved by making better compost.

At the beach - time you enjoyed wasting, is not wasted.

O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.

I am glad you have a Cat, but I do not believe it is So remarkable a cat as My Cat.

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

Before a cat will condescend to treat you as a trusted friend, some little token of esteem is needed, like a dish of cream.

Impatient people, according to Bacon, are like the bees, and kill themselves in stinging others.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the 'dear deceit' of beauty.

Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.

The old should be explorers, be curious, risk transgression, explore oldness itself.

Time past and time future allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time.

Here were decent godless people; Their only monument the asphalt road And a thousand lost golf balls.

Of new acquaintances one can never be sure because one likes them one day that it will be so the next. Of old friends one is sure that it will be the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Overachievers don't think reasonably, sensibly, or rationally.

I have but one life to give to adventure.

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.

The right to rebellion is the right to seek a higher rule, and not to wander in mere lawlessness.

And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you I will show you fear in a handful of dust

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think; whatever you want, be sure that is what you want; whatever you feel, be sure that is what you feel.

What is true, is true only for one time and only for one place.