T. S. Eliot Quotes
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.
In life there is not time to grieve long.
Hold tight, hold tight, we must insist that the world is what we have always taken it to be.
These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmen.
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands,
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
Endurance of friendship does not depend
Upon ourselves, but upon circumstance.
But circumstance is not undetermined.
Unreal friendship may turn to real
But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended.
Sooner shall enmity turn to alliance.
The enmity that never knew friendship
Can sooner know accord.
I say to you: Make perfect your will.
I say: take no thought of the harvest,
But only of proper sowing.
Accident is design
And design is accident
In a cloud of unknowing.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
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.
Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
For all things exist as seen by thee,
only as known by thee, all things exist
Only in thy light, and thy glory is declared
even in that which denies thee;
the darkness declares the glory of light.
Those who deny thee could not deny, if thou didst not exist;
and their denial is never complete,
for if it were so, they would not exist.
They affirm thee in living; all things affirm thee in living.
Men learn little from others' experience.
But in the life of one man, never
The same time returns.
They don't understand what it is to be awake,
To be living on several planes at once
Though one cannot speak with several voices at once.
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.
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.
Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.
What is hell?
Hell is oneself,
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections.
Everyone's alone — or so it seems to me.
They make noises, and think they are talking to each other;
They make faces, and think they understand each other.
And I'm sure they don't. Is that a delusion?
You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it.
You only know what it is not to hope:
You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you.
For some are sane and some are mad
And some are good and some are bad
And some are better, some are worse
But all may be described in verse.
Two people who know they do not understand each other,
Breeding children whom they do not understand
And who will never understand them.
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?
If we all were judged according to the consequences
Of all our words and deeds, beyond the intention
And beyond our limited understanding
Of ourselves and others, we should all be condemned.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow.
