T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot OMwas an American-born British essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic and "one of the twentieth century's major poets". He moved to England in 1914 at age 25, settling, working and marrying there. He was eventually naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39, renouncing his American citizenship...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth26 September 1888
CountryUnited States of America
T. S. Eliot quotes about
fighting expectations alive
We fight to keep something alive rather than in the expectation that anything will triumph.
lonely people laughing
The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely.
tired dying mortality
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me, I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
phrases ends epitaph
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.
loneliness thinking talking
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?
food winter smell
The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways.
loathing admiration efficiency
I suspect that in our loathing of totalitarianism, there is infused a good deal of admiration for its efficiency.
sake culture aim
Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake.
race creative mind
Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius.
philosophy effort understanding
A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after - and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.
struggle alaska lovers
So the lover must struggle for words.
joy painful moments
This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.
ignorance order way
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not.
boxers poet easier
I was too slow a mover to be a boxer. It was much easier to be a poet.