T.S. Eliot Quotes - Page 3

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.

We returned to our palaces, these Kingdoms, but no longer at ease here in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.

Someone 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.

Destiny waits in the hand of god, shaping the still unshapen..

We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith.

Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment.

And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now.

Do I dare Disturb the universe?

But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood-
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance

music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but
you are the music
While the music lasts.

If time and space, as sages say,
Are things which cannot be,
The sun which does not feel decay
No greater is than we.
So why, Love, should we ever pray
To live a century?
The butterfly that lives a day
Has lived eternity.

T.S. Eliot deems dangerous the tendency "to associate tradition with the immovable; to think of it as something hostile to all change; to aim to return to some previous condition which we imagine as having been capable of preservation in perpetuity". "Tradition without intelligence, he challenges, "is not worth having.

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.

Unreal friendship may turn to real
But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended