A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.
T. S. Eliot

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

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

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

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

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.
T. S. Eliot

April is the cruellest month.
T. S. Eliot

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

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

Business today consists in persuading crowds.
T. S. Eliot


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

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
T. S. Eliot

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T. S. Eliot

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

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

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
T. S. Eliot

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

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

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.
T. S. Eliot

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