The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share
Dear Mother, I am getting on nicely in my work at the bank, and like it ... I want to find out something about… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share
All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share
When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom,… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share
Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share
Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and undesiring Except in… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share
the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share
The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share
It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share
