A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

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.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

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.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

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.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

Home is where one starts from.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

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.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
- T. S. Eliot Quote

If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it."
- T. S. Eliot Quote

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

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.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

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

Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

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 Quote

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

So the lover must struggle for words.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
- T. S. Eliot Quote

Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?
- T. S. Eliot Quote

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?
- T. S. Eliot Quote

Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.
- T. S. Eliot Quote