All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
Taking the question in general, I should say, in the case of many poets, that the most important thing for them to… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular… — 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
