{"id":158526,"date":"2023-05-07T12:39:54","date_gmt":"2023-05-07T12:39:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.english-culture.com\/?p=158526"},"modified":"2024-04-25T13:58:27","modified_gmt":"2024-04-25T13:58:27","slug":"t-s-eliot-poetic-quotes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.english-culture.com\/t-s-eliot-poetic-quotes\/","title":{"rendered":"T.S. Eliot poetic quotes"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"T.S.<\/a>
T.S. Eliot poetic quotes<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

T.S. Eliot poetic quotes, aphorisms, sentences, definitions, criticisms and ideas that have a great poetic and literary meaning chosen from his various works.<\/span><\/p>\n

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.<\/span>
\nT. S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

First Priest: But again, is it war or peace? Messenger: Peace, but not the kiss of peace.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job…. Poetry.. remains one person talking to another…. no poet can write a poem of amplitude unless he is the master of the prosaic.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

When a Cat adopts you there is nothing to be done about it except to put up with it until the wind changes.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

We see the light but see not whence it comes. O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

In the uncertain hour before the morning Near the ending of interminable night At the recurrent end of the unending After the dark dove with the flickering tongue Had passed below the horizon of his homing.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

The man who returns will have to meet The boy who left.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

These modern productions are all very well, But there’s nothing to equal, from what I hear tell, That moment of mystery When I made history As Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

There are several symptoms Which must occur together, and to a marked degree, To qualify a patient for my sanatorium: And one of them is an honest mind. That is one of the causes of their suffering.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

In spite of all the dishonour, the broken standards, the broken lives, The broken faith in one place or another, There was something left that was more than the tales Of old men on winter evenings.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Ash on an old man’s sleeve Is all the ash the burnt roses leave. Dust in the air suspended Marks the place where a story ended. Dust inbreathed was a house – The wall, the wainscot and the mouse The death of hope and despair, This is the death of air.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Unreal city, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Keeping time, Keeping the rhythm in their dancing As in their living in the living seasons The time of the seasons and the constellations The time of milking and the time of harvest The time of the coupling of man and woman And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling. <\/span>Eating and drinking. Dung and death.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Let these words answer For what is done, not to be done again May the judgement not be too heavy upon us<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

In life there is not time to grieve long But this, this is out of life, this is out of time, An instant eternity of evil and wrong.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

The hippopotamus’s day Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts; God works in a mysterious way – The Church can sleep and feed at once.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Wavering between the profit and the loss In this brief transit where the dreams cross The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

And what the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

\"T.S.<\/a>
T.S. Eliot poetic aphorisms<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

He is every bit as sane as you or I, He sees the world as clearly as you or I see it, It is only that he has seen a great deal more than that. <\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws? She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; They called me the hyacinth girl. – Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Od’ und leer das Meer.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of children in the foliage Quick now, here, now, always – Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

We can say of Shakespeare, that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

And Shakespeare himself takes liberties which only his genius justifies; liberties which Dante, with an equal genius, does not take. To pass on to posterity one\u2019s own language, more highly developed, more refined, and more precise than it was before one wrote it, that is the highest possible achievement of the poet as poet. <\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

To be truly great poets it is not enough to have language and vision; it is also necessary to possess a great philosophical and\/or theological system, which Shakespeare lacked and Dante did not.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

I gotta use words when I talk to you But if you understand or if you don’t That’s nothing to me and nothing to you.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall My buried life, and Paris in the spring, I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world To be wonderful and youthful after all.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. Old men ought to be explorers Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Think not forever of yourselves, O Chiefs, nor of your own generation. Think of continuing generations of our families, think of our grandchildren and of those yet unborn, whose faces are coming from beneath the ground.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing, No end to the withering of withered flowers.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

We can say of Shakespeare, that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

It seems just possible that a poem might happen To a very young man: but a poem is not poetry – That is a life.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

\"T.S.<\/a>
T.S. Eliot poetry quotes<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and of our visible, sensible world.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

To rest in your own suffering Is evasion of suffering. We must learn to suffer more.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

All things become less real, man passes From unreality to unreality.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

The death of hope and despair, This is the death of air.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Garlic and sapphires in the mud Clot the bedded axle-tree. The trilling wire in the blood Sings below inveterate scars And reconciles forgotten wars.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur and faeces, Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

There are flood and drought over the eyes and in the mouth, dead water and dead sand contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil gapes at the vanity of toil, laughs without mirth. This is the death of the earth.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Any man has to, needs to, wants to Once in a lifetime, do a girl in.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

It is not the “greatness,” the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

When the day’s hustle and bustle is done, Then the Gumbie Cat’s work is but hardly begun.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

What have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards in an age which advances progressively backwards?<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

I am glad you have a Cat, but I do not believe it is So remarkable a cat as My Cat. My Cat is a Lilliecat Hubvously. What a lilliecat it is. There never was such a Lilliecat. Its Name is JELLYORUM and its one Idea is to be Usefull!!<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger. Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

The Rum Turn Tugger is a terrible bore: When you let him in, then he wants to be out; He’s always on the wrong side of every door, And as soon as he’s at home, then he’d like to get about.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

In the vacant places We will build with new bricks<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

The endless cycle of idea and action, \/ Endless invention, endless experiment, \/ Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; \/ Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; \/ Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

A woman drew her long black hair out tight, And fiddled whisper music on those strings, And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings, And crawled head downward down a blackened wall.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult… The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience – in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

\"T.S.<\/a>
T.S. Eliot in the library<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.<\/span>
\nT. S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger. <\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

He knew the anguish of the marrow The ague of the skeleton; No contact possible to flesh Allayed the fever of the bone.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are infolded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.<\/span>
\nT. S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids Sprouting despondently at area gates.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. For I have known them all already, known them all: – Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;<\/span>
\nI know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room.<\/span>
\nT. S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Clear the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! take the stone from stone, take the skin from the arm, take the muscle from bone, and wash them.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only The wind will listen.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree In the cool of the day.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me, I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Much to cast down, much to build, much to restore.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Sometimes these cogitations still amaze The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

O Light Invisible, we praise Thee! Too bright for mortal vision.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Speech impelled us To purify the dialect of the tribe And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other Who think the same thoughts without need of speech<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

The great poet, in writing himself, writes his time.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

The eastern light our spires touch at morning, The light that slants upon our western doors at evening, The twilight over stagnant pools at batflight, Moon light and star light, owl and moth light, Glow-worm glowlight on a grassblade. O Light Invisible, we worship Thee!<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

God is leaving us, God is leaving us, more pang, more pain, than birth or death.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

I’ll convert you! Into a stew. A nice little, white little, missionary stew!<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Two live as one One live as two Two live as three Under the bam Under the boo Under the bamboo tree.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

\"T.S.<\/a>
T.S. Eliot Child house<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To country people Cows are mild, And flee from any stick they throw; But I’m a timid town bred child, And all the cattle seem to know.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light. We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and ecstasy is too much pain.<\/span>
\nT.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

By the same author you can also read:<\/span><\/p>\n

T.S. Eliot quotes and aphorisms<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

T.S. Eliot thoughts and reflections<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Aforismi e citazioni di T.S. Eliot<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Aprile il mese pi\u00f9 crudele<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Complete Poems by T.S. Eliot<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Selected essays by T.S. Eliot<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Collected poems 1909-1935<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Quotes by authors<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Quotes by arguments<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Essays with quotes<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Thoughts and reflections<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

News and events<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

T.S. Eliot poetic quotes, aphorisms, sentences, definitions, criticisms and ideas that have a great poetic and literary meaning chosen from his various works. We shall not cease from exploration And the end …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[161,715,136,1220,33,141,718,2811,261,2091,209,143,831,11,190,193,171,1128,90,12],"tags":[106,4323,4956,365,4963,5370,87,1483,292,902,212,2102,294,4965,1585,5361],"class_list":["post-158526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aphorisms","category-arts-crafts","category-communication","category-culture","category-education","category-english","category-english-world","category-entertainment","category-fantasy","category-images","category-imagination","category-language","category-learning","category-literature","category-love","category-poetry","category-quotes","category-quotes-by-authors","category-spirituality","category-writing","tag-aphorisms","tag-april","tag-dante","tag-god","tag-hollow","tag-literary-criticism","tag-love","tag-men","tag-poem","tag-poems","tag-poet","tag-poetic","tag-poetry","tag-shakespeasre","tag-t-s-eliot","tag-the-waste-land"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t