Skip to content

Life Quotes by T. S. Eliot

46 Life quotes by T. S. Eliot

All Life quotes T. S. Eliot’s page

Desire is portrayed as constant movement, while love is described as unmoving and the cause of that motion. Eliot’s lines remind us that we can dodge life’s tricks but cannot escape death, and that good and evil often blend together over time. The excerpts explore tension between wanting, inevitability, and the mixing of moral forces.

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

“He who was living is now dead. We who were living are now dying.”

Image

Tradition: how the vitality of the past enriches the life of the present.

Image

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

Image

In life there is not time to grieve long.

Image

It is worth while dying, to find out what life is.

Image

Finding a way to live the simple life is one of life's supreme complications.

Image

You can evade life, but you can not evade Death.

Image

The single Rose Is now the Garden Where all loves end

Image

I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me, I am dying in my own death and…

Image

Between the desire And the spasm, Between the potency And the existence, Between the essence And the descent, Falls the Shadow.

Image

In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light. We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and…

Image

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge…

Image

As we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated of dead and living.

Image

Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws? She tells them of Life and Death, and of all…

Image

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is…

Image

Birth, and copulation, and death; that's all the facts when you come to brass tacks.

Image

Can we only love Something created in our own imaginations? Are we all in fact unloving and unloveable? Then one is alone,…

Image

The greatest proof of Christianity for others is not how far a man can logically analyze his reasons for believing, but how…

Image

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi…

Image

Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and undesiring…

Image

For every life and every act consequence of good and evil can be shown and as in time results of many deeds…

Image

The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that…

Image

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

Image

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicatied Of dead and living,…

Image

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before; though we know not just when, or why, or how,…

Image

Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. Old men ought to be explorers Here or there does…

Image

Religion, as distinguished from modern paganism, implies a life in conformity with nature. It may be observed that the natural life and…

Image

To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one…

Image

Lady of silences Calm and distressed Torn and most whole Rose of memory Rose of forgetfulness Exhausted and life-giving Worried reposeful The…

Image

I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular…

Image

The fool,fixed in his folly,may think He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

Image

It is worth dying to find out what life is.

Image

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

Image

Can we only love Something created in our own imaginations?

Image

“Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living.”

Image

In the life of one man, never The same time returns.

Image

Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance

Image

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Image

My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand.

Image

If one has to earn a living, therefore, the safest occupation is that most remote from the arts.

Image

Other authors on Life

More by T. S. Eliot

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

Dear Mother, I am getting on nicely in my work at the bank, and like it ... I want to find out something about…

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all…

We must always take risks. That is our destiny.

All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the…

When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom,…

Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.

Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and undesiring Except in…

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…

We had the experience, but we missed the meaning.

The end is in the beginning.

You have learned enough to see that cats are much like you and me.

The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.

It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.

Every end is a beginning...And every beginning is an end.