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 emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.


T.S. Eliot

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And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
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What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
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Time present and time past / are both perhaps present in time future.
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I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
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At the still point, there the dance is.
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What the dead had no speech for, when living,
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Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.
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Or music heard so deeply
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While the musi...
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A condition of complete simplicity
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All time is unreedemable.
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You say I am repeating
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Do not let me hear
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The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
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Only through time time is conquered
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I am glad you have a Cat, but I do not believe it is So remarkable a cat as My Cat.
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time past and time future
what might have been and what has been
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We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive whe...
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So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
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The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues ...
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Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contain...
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Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
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Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, in...
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Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
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If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter
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You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends, and how, how rare and strange it is, to find i...
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My name is only an anagram of toilets.
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For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice....
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The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, / Glowed on the marble.
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When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives hi...
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What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?
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This love is silent.
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Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form ...
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You are the music while the music lasts.
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If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, you must accept the terms it offers ...
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The winter evening settles down / With smell of steaks in passage ways.
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Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right; decide on what you think is right and stick to it.
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Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
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Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, adv...
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The river is within us, the sea is all about us; The sea is the land's edge also
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When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our se...
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Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.
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Footfalls echo in the memory, Down the passage which we did not take, Towards the door we never open...
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Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.
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Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of pe...
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In my beginning is my end.
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Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
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Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
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It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the 'dear dece...
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Donne, I suppose, was such another / Who found no substitute for sense. / To seize and clutch and pe...
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What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
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I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids/Sprouting despondently at area gates.
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Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers.
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The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and ye...
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The wounded surgeon plies the steel / That questions the distempered part.
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We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none t...
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The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
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Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow.
T.S. ELIOT
And I will show you something different from either your shadow at morning striding behind you or yo...
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I do not approve the extermination of the enemy; the policy of exterminating or, as it is barbarousl...
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Radio is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at th...
T.S. ELIOT
After the erection of the Chinese Wall of Milton, blank verse has suffered not only arrest but retro...
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At the first turning of the second stair / I turned and saw below / The same shape twisted on the ba...
T.S. ELIOT
The dove descending breaks the air / With flame of incandescent terror.
T.S. ELIOT
People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.
T.S. ELIOT
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mea...
T.S. ELIOT
If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it ...
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But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will...
T.S. ELIOT
He's outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.)
And his footprints are not found in ...
T.S. ELIOT
Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door.
His name, as I ought to have told you before,
Is reall...
T.S. ELIOT
With Cats, some say, one rule is true:
Don’t speak till you are spoken to.
Myself, I do ...
T.S. ELIOT
Before a Cat will condescend
To treat you as a trusted friend,
Some little token of esteem...
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The Pekes and the Pollicles, everyone knows,
Are proud and implacable, passionate foes;
I...
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The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may...
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The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
T.S. ELIOT
And we must think no further of you.
T.S. ELIOT
We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well...
T.S. ELIOT
The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we li...
T.S. ELIOT
Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, /...
T.S. ELIOT
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unsp...
T.S. ELIOT
For he will do
As he do do
And there's no doing anything about it!
T.S. ELIOT
To country people Cows are mild,
And flee from any stick they throw;
But I’m a timid tow...
T.S. ELIOT
We have only to conquer
Now, by suffering. This is the easier victory.
Now is the triumph...
T.S. ELIOT
Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke ...
T.S. ELIOT
One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in t...
T.S. ELIOT
The one thing you can do is to do nothing. Wait . . . You will find that you survive humiliation and...
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Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorati...
T.S. ELIOT
Clear the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! take stone from stone and wash them.
T.S. ELIOT
I like not only to be loved, but to be told I am loved.
T.S. ELIOT
Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences...
T.S. ELIOT
Ash on an old man's sleeve / Is all the ash the burnt roses leave, / Dust in the air suspended / Mar...
T.S. ELIOT
The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human ...
T.S. ELIOT
My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measu...
T.S. ELIOT
Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.
T.S. ELIOT
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to ...
T.S. ELIOT
A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
T.S. ELIOT
All cases are unique and very similar to others.
T.S. ELIOT
We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and ...
T.S. ELIOT
When lovely woman stoops to folly and / Paces about her room again, alone, / She smoothes her hair w...
T.S. ELIOT
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes.
T.S. ELIOT
We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test o...
T.S. ELIOT
Human kind cannot bear much reality.
T.S. ELIOT
If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being ca...
T.S. ELIOT
In the vain laughter of folly, wisdom hears half its applause.
T.S. ELIOT
To hear the latest Pole / transmit the Preludes, through his hair and fingertips.
T.S. ELIOT
Friendship should be more than biting time can sever.
T.S. ELIOT
That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
T.S. ELIOT
Whatever you do, don't whimper, but take the consequences.
T.S. ELIOT
No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.
T.S. ELIOT
Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it.
T.S. ELIOT
I said to my soul be still, and wait without hope; for hope would be hope of the wrong thing; wait w...
T.S. ELIOT
When a Cat adopts you there is nothing to be done about it except put up with it until the wind chan...
T.S. ELIOT
The highest form of treason: to do the right thing for the wrong reason. Murder in the Cathedral
T.S. ELIOT
Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
T.S. ELIOT
Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin.
T.S. ELIOT
I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is fa...
T.S. ELIOT
The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.
T.S. ELIOT
There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.
T.S. ELIOT
When one wanted one's interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to ...
T.S. ELIOT
For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afterno...
T.S. ELIOT
Do I dare Disturb the universe?
T.S. ELIOT
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with s...
T.S. ELIOT
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
T.S. ELIOT
There is shadow under this red rock // (Come in under the shadow of this red rock) // And I will sho...
T.S. ELIOT
Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Prec...
T.S. ELIOT
We understand the ordinary business of living,
We know how to work the machine
T.S. ELIOT
Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead.
T.S. ELIOT
It is certain that a book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.
T.S. ELIOT
We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during wh...
T.S. ELIOT