40 Famous Quotes by Poet T. S. Eliot

I don’t believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.

Art never improves but… the material of art is never quite the same.

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.

Business today consists in persuading crowds.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions but to use the ordinary ones and in working them up into poetry to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

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

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute and yet is relative in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.

For love would be love of the wrong thing there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time then I know it can’t be much good.

Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.

Home is where one starts from.

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

For love would be love of the wrong thing there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

There is no method but to be very intelligent.

Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?

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?

Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.

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?

For love would be love of the wrong thing there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

This love is silent.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being to which we rarely penetrate for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

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.

Poetry should help not only to refine the language of the time but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions but to use the ordinary ones and in working them up into poetry to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.

We know too much and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion and so is our religion.

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

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.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being to which we rarely penetrate for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time and yet remain lonesome.

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.

A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time then I know it can’t be much good.

Poetry should help not only to refine the language of the time but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.

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 last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.