- War is not a life: it is a situation,
- One which may neither be ignored nor accepted.
T.S. ELIOT, A Note on War Poetry
- I have given you the power of choice, and you only alternate
- Between futile speculation and unconsidered action.
It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T. S. ELIOT, preface, Transit of Venus
Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmen.
T. S. ELIOT, Murder in the Cathedral
The soul of Man must quicken to creation.
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.
T. S. ELIOT, The Sacred Wood
- There will be time, there will be time
- To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
- There will be time to murder and create,
- And time for all the works and days of hands,
- That lift and drop a question on your plate;
- Time for you and time for me,
- And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
- And for a hundred visions and revisions,
- Before the taking of a toast and tea.
T. S. ELIOT, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
- The lot of man is ceaseless labor,
- Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder.
Ambition fortifies the will of man to become ruler over other men: it operates with deception, cajolery, and violence, it is the action of impurity upon impurity.
T. S. ELIOT, Murder in the Cathedral
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
T. S. ELIOT, Tradition and the Individual Talent
- One thing you cannot know:
- The sudden extinction of every alternative,
- The unexpected crash of the iron cataract.
- You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it.
- You only know what it is not to hope:
- You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you.
T. S. ELIOT, The Family Reunion
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.
T. S. ELIOT, Time Magazine, Oct. 23, 1950
No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.
T. S. ELIOT, The Music of Poetry
- When the Stranger says: "What is the meaning of this city?
- Do you huddle close together because you love each other?"
- What will you answer? "We all dwell together
- To make money from each other"? or "This is a community"?
- The awful daring of a moment's surrender
- Which an age of prudence can never retract
- By this, and this only, we have existed.
T. S. ELIOT, The Waste Land
Human kind cannot bear very much reality.
T. S. ELIOT, Murder in the Cathedral
- If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
- If the unheard, unspoken
- Word is unspoken, unheard;
- Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
- The Word without a word, the Word within
- The world and for the world;
- And the light shone in darkness and
- Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
- About the centre of the silent Word.
T. S. ELIOT, Ash-Wednesday
Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has never happened before.
- I grow old ... I grow old ...
- I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
T. S. ELIOT, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
In life there is not time to grieve long.
T. S. ELIOT, Murder in the Cathedral
- Men tighten the knot of confusion
- Into perfect misunderstanding.
T. S. ELIOT, The Family Reunion
- Unreal City,
- Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
- A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
- I had not thought death had undone so many.
- Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
- And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
- Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
- To where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
- With a dead sound on the final stock of nine.
T. S. ELIOT, The Waste Land
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.
T. S. ELIOT, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.
- For last year's words belong to last year's language
- And next year's words await another voice.
T. S. ELIOT, Four Quartets
