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Portrait of T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

433 quotes in 1527 categories

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Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist, and playwright who helped shape modernist poetry in English. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.

About T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist, and playwright who helped shape modernist poetry in English. He was a leading figure of modernist poetry and changed the art with his use of pessimistic language, distinctive writing style, and innovative verse structure. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.

Quotes by T. S. Eliot · Page 10

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.

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“HARRY: But I thought I might escape from one life to another, And it may be all one life, with no escape.”

Escape

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When the whole world is running headlong towards the precipice, one who walks in the opposite direction is looked at as being…

Being crazy

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

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Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.

Adversity

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Neither way is better. / Both ways are necessary. / It is also necessary / To make a choice between them.

Choice

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The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.

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A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.

Alive

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I journeyed to London, to the timekept City, Where the River flows, with foreign flotations. There I was told: we have too…

Church

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Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands…

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Nothing pleases people more than to go on thinking what they have always thought, and at the same time imagine that they…

Advantage

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Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an…

Emotion

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Shape without form, shade without color, Paralyzed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom…

Color

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O father, father Gone from us, lost to us, The church lies bereft, Alone, Desecrated, desolated. And the heathen shall build On…

Bereft

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If you find examples of humanism which are anti-religious, or at least in opposition to the religious faith of the place and…

Anti religious

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I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures…

Book

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“Quick now, here, now, always-- A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything)”

Poetry

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All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment.

Art

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Time past and time future allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time.

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We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us...…

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Maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one's age, and with the same intensity…

Age

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We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know…

Exploration

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Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity, there never was a cat of such deceitfulness and sauvity.

Cat

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I shall not want Honor in Heaven For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney And have talk with Coriolanus And other heroes…

Heaven

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And the end and the beginning were always there Before the beginning and after the end.

Beginning

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These are only hints an guesses... the rest is prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action.

Action

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If we really want to pray we must first learn to listen, for in the silence of the heart God speaks.

Clean heart

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

Differences

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Those who talk of the bible as a monument of English prose are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave…

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O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and…

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Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I…

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Poetry is not an assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.

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What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is…

Beginning

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O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant

Dark

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I believe the moment of birth Is when we have knowledge of death I believe the season of birth Is the season…

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Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste and end by debauching it.

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This is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word.

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“You dozed, and watched the night revealing The thousand sordid images Of which your soul was constituted;”

Spirituality

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It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate…

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We can say of Shakespeare, that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.

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T. S. Eliot by topic

Inspirational (79) Love (52) Time (48) Life (46) Poetry (45) Men (38) Poet (25) Quartets (23) Funny (19) People (18) Death (18) Art (17) World (15) Thinking (15) Artist (15) Religion (13)