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T. S. Eliot Quotes


If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?

If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it."

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

In my beginning is my end.

It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.

It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.

It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.

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

Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.

Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.

My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.

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

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

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

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.

Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.