Quotes by T.S. Eliot

The dripping blood our only drink,The bloody flesh our only food:In spite of which we like to thinkThat we are sound, substantial flesh and blood--Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

Do I dare Disturb the universe?

Do not let me hearOf the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.

The backward look behind the assuranceOf recorded history, the backward half-lookOver the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.

Unreal friendship may turn to real But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended

Before a Cat will condescendTo treat you as a trusted friend,Some little token of esteemIs needed, like a dish of cream;And you might now and then supplySome caviare, or Strassburg Pie,Some potted grouse, or salmon paste —Hes sure to have his personal taste.(I know a Cat, who makes a habitOf eating nothing else but rabbit,And when hes finished, licks his pawsSos not to waste the onion sauce.)A Cats entitled to expectThese evidences of respect.And so in time you reach your aim,And finally call him by his name.

And right action is freedom from past and future also.For most of us, this is the aim never to be realized. Who are only undefeated because we have gone on trying. The Dry Salvages

But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse

If time and space, as sages say,Are things which cannot be,The sun which does not feel decayNo greater is than we.So why, Love, should we ever prayTo live a century?The butterfly that lives a dayHas lived eternity.

Our second danger is to associate tradition with the immovable; to think of it as something hostile to all change; to aim to return to some previous condition which we imagine as having been capable of preservation in perpetuity, instead of aiming to stimulate the life which produced that condition in its time. . . . a tradition without intelligence is not worth having . . .

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.

Under the penitential gatesSustained by staring SeraphimWhere the souls of the devoutBurn invisible and dim.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

It seems that one ought to read in two ways: 1) because of a particular and personal interest, which makes the thing ones own, regardless of what other people think of the book 2) to a certain extent, because it is something one ought to have read but one must be quite clear this why one is reading.

I dont know much about gods, but I think the river is a strong, brown god

music heard so deeplyThat it is not heard at all, butyou are the musicWhile the music lasts.

A christian martyrdom is never an accident, for Saints are not made by accident.

Two people who know they do not understand each other, breeding children whom they do not understand and who will never understand them.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.