Quotes by T. S. Eliot

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

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Poetry is a mugs game.

One starts an action simply because one must do something.

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.

The historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

Birth copulation and death. Thats all the facts when you come to brass tacks.

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

All cases are unique and very similar to others.

Philosophy - the purple bullfinch in the lilac tree.

When a poets mind is perfectly equipped for its work it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.

When a great poet has lived certain things have been done once for all and cannot be achieved again.

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.

The poets mind is ... a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings phrases images which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced.

Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity sluggish and indomitable as a glacier will mitigate the most violent and depress the most exalted revolution.

Success is relative: It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.

April is the cruellest month breeding Lilacs out of the dead land mixing memory and desire stirring dull roots with Spring rain.