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T. S. Eliot Quotes

Total quotes: 22
“What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them.”
— T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party
Tagged: People Change
“I learn a great deal by merely observing you, and letting you talk as long as you please, and taking note of what you do not say.”
— T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party
Tagged: Language, Observing
“The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.”
— T. S. Eliot, via Amazon
Tagged: Literature, literary purpose, History, Feelings, emotions, Writing
“Every moment is a fresh beginning.”
— T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party
Tagged: New, Make It New
“One seems to become a myth, a fabulous creature that doesn't exist. One doesn't feel any different. It isn't that you get bigger to fit the world, the world gets smaller to fit you. You remain exactly the same.”
— T. S. Eliot, T. S. Eliot
Tagged: Fame, Projections of Self, The Myth in the Cult of Personality
“But how can I explain, how can I explain to you? You will understand less after I have explained it.”
— T. S. Eliot
“Music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts.”
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Tagged: Music, Hear, deeply, personal, act, Intimate, Passion, Calling, creating, Art
“What we call the beginning is often the end 
And to make and end is to make a beginning. 
The end is where we start from.”
— T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," Four Quartets
Tagged: Ending, Beginning, Beginning And The End, Starting Over, Poetry
“This is the use of memory: 
For liberation—not less of love but expanding 
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation 
From the future as well as the past.”
— T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets
Tagged: Memory, Freedom, Love, Letting Go, Purpose Of Memory, Freeing Yourself
“Some one said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.”
— T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent
Tagged: Emotion of Art, Living In The Moment, Writing, Writing In The Present, Experience, Writing Consciously
“There will be time, there will be time,
to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.”
— T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot
Tagged: Repetition Examples, Repetition
“Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.”
— T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Tagged: Prison, key, Key Confirms The Prison, Prisoner, locked, unable to do what one wants, Life, poem, Poetry
“It is impossible to say just what I mean!”
— T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Tagged: Word Failure, The Impossibility of Communication, When Words Fail
“History is a pattern of timeless moments.”
— T. S. Eliot, LITTLE GIDDING(No. 4 of 'Four Quartets')
Tagged: History, Eternal Return, circles, Routines of World History
“You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles’ heel.”
— T. S. Eliot, Portrait of a Lady
Tagged: strength
“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.”
— T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent
“Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future. And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present all time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation.”
— T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets
Tagged: Conservation, Time, This Is Time, The Meaning of Time, Understanding Time, Potential, Vicious Circle, Eternal Return
“At the still point, there the dance is.”
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Tagged: The Art of Awareness, How To Think
“You are the still point of the turning world.”
— T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets
Tagged: Love, Descriptions of Muses
“The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”
— T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent
Tagged: Emotion of Art, Living In The Moment, Writing, Writing In The Present, Experience, Writing Consciously
“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism.”
— T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays
Tagged: Relationalism
“Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, 'tradition' should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.”
— T. S. Eliot, T. S. Eliot
Tagged: Conservation
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