Quotations by Author

T. S. Eliot

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind/Cannot bear very much reality.

Time past and time future/What might have been and what has been/Point to one end, which is always present.

Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence.

Or say that the end precedes the beginning, /And the end and the beginning were always there /Before the beginning and after the end. /And all is always now.

Words strain, /Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, /Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, /Will not stay still.

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

Trying to use words, and every attempt/Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure/ Because one has only learnt to get the better of words/For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which/One is no longer disposed to say it.

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.

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

The moments of happiness —not the sense of well-being,/Fruition, fulfilment, security or affecton,/Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination.

At the moment which is not of action or inaction/You can receive this: 'on whatever sphere of being/The mind of a man may be intent/At the time of death' — that is the one action (And the time of death is every moment)/Which shall fructify in the lives of others: And do not think of the fruit of action./Fare forward.

To apprehend/The point of intersection of the timeless/With time, is an occupation for the saint—/No occupation either, but something given/And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,/ Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

For most of us, there is only the unattended/Moment, the moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,/The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply/That it is not heard at all, but you are the music/ While the music lasts.

Right action is freedom/From past and future also./For most of us, this is the aim/Never here to be realised;/Who are only undefeated/Because we have gone on trying.

History may be servitude,/History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,/The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,/To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

At the source of the longest river/The voice of the hidden waterfall/And the children in the apple-tree.

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

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

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.

Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.