T. S. Eliot

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

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.

I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.

Home is where one starts from.

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.

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

There is no method but to be very intelligent.

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.

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

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

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.

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.

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.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

You are the music while the music lasts.

This love is silent.

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

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