Quotes by T. S. Eliot

How wild it was, to let it be.

We understand the ordinary business of living, We know how to work the machine

You are not here to verify,instruct yourself, or inform curiosityor carry report. You are here to kneelwhere prayer has been valid. And prayer is more than an order of words, the conscious occupation of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

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

It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored in climate that seem to me the happiest but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both.

A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time then I know it cant be much good.

The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible.

The young feel tired at the end of an action The old at the beginning.

In the last few years everything Id done up to sixty or so has seemed very childish.

You have now learned to see That cats are much like you and me And other people whom we find Possessed of various types of mind.

To do the useful thing to say the courageous thing to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one mans life.

In my beginning is my end.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always asked to do things and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.

What is actual is actual only for one time. And only for one place.

What is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place.

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

Genuine blasphemy genuine in spirit and not purely verbal is the product of partial belief and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect Christian.

Should I after tea and cakes and ices have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

What we call the beginning is often an end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest. For it is part of education to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.