With Cats, some say, one rule is true:
Don’t speak till you are spoken to.
Myself, I do not hold with that —
I say, you should ad-dress a Cat.
But always keep in mind that he
Resents familiarity.
I bow, and taking off my hat,
Ad-dress him in this form: O Cat!
But if he is the Cat next door,
Whom I have often met before
(He comes to see me in my flat)
I greet him with an oopsa Cat!
I think I've heard them call him James —
But we've not got so far as names.


T.S. Eliot

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A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.
It is hard to look up to a leader who keeps his ear to the ground.
The most wasted day of all is that in which we have not laughed.
The more intelligent a man is, the more originality he discovers in men. Ordinary people see no diff...
The intelligence is proved not by ease of learning, but by understanding what we learn.
Communication is something so simple and difficult that we can never put it in simple words.
Like threads of silver seen through crystal beads
Let love through good deeds show.
How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.
In everyone's heart stirs a great homesickness.
That is the supreme value of history. The study of it is the best guarantee against repeating it.
Our wisdom comes usually from our experience, and our experience comes largely from our experience.
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To reprove small faults within due vehemence, is as absurd as if a man should take a great hammer to...
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Freedom also includes the right to mismanage your own affairs.
Let your friends be the friends of your deliberate choice.
The man who has strong opinions and always says what he thinks is courageous - and friendless.
Friendship is love with understanding.
So few people think. When we find one who really does, we call him a genius
Your life can't go according to plan if you have no plan.
Practicing the Golden Rule is not a sacrifice; it is an investment.
Conversation is an exercise of the mind; gossip is merely an exercise of the tongue.
An expert gossiper knows how much to leave out of a conversation
To live so that you would not be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip, is to have li...
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If you would attain greatness, think no little thoughts.
We are born brave, trusting and greedy, and most of us remain greedy.
People are changed, not by coercion or intimidation, but by example.
Children are natural mimics; they act like their parents in spite of every effort to teach them good...
The guilty catch themselves.
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If happiness could be brought, few of us could pay the price.
Happiness will never come to those who fail to appreciate what they already have.
Happiness is in the heart, not in the circumstances.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
Hatred is a boomerang which is sure to hit you harder than the one at whom you throw it.
Hate pollutes the mind.
If we miraculously became the people we hate, how lovable we would find ourselves.
To feel "fit as a fiddle" you must tone down your middle.
Our health always seems much more valuable after we lose it.
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Honesty is a question of right or wrong, not a matter of policy.
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Friendship is a living thing that lasts only as long as it is nourished with kindness, empathy and u...
Having supplied them with names, omnipotence, justice, knowledge, Providence, - what are they?
A good laugh is sunshine in a house.
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Age withers only the outside.
Where ambition ends happiness begins.
The best answer to answer to anger is silence.
The size of a man is measured by the size of the thing that makes him angry.
A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he is talking about.
People who know the least always argue the most.
If you look for the positive things in life; you will find them.
What we are doing at the moment is more that just one thing added to the rest; it is a memoir.
Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes
The human mind must believe in something, so why not let it believe what it does believe.
He that boasts of his own knowledge proclaims his ignorance
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What is hell? Hell is oneself.
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Merely projections...
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Unreal friendship may turn to real
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We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we star...
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My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand.
T.S. ELIOT
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
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An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolong...
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Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter.
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The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.
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Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is th...
T.S. ELIOT
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T.S. ELIOT
What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
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There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.
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In my end is my beginning.
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What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is w...
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Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity
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Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.
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No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
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The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.
T.S. ELIOT
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
T.S. ELIOT
If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
T.S. ELIOT
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
T.S. ELIOT
I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait ...
T.S. ELIOT
April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desir...
T.S. ELIOT
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
T.S. ELIOT
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisi...
T.S. ELIOT
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We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive whe...
T.S. ELIOT
Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.
T.S. ELIOT
Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth.
T.S. ELIOT
What we know of other people's only our memory of the moments during which we knew them.
T.S. ELIOT
It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good.
T.S. ELIOT
There's no vocabulary For love within a family, love that's lived in But not looked at, love within ...
T.S. ELIOT
There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or...
T.S. ELIOT
Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a hi...
T.S. ELIOT
Here, said she, / Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor.
T.S. ELIOT
I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.
T.S. ELIOT
One of the low on whom assurance sits / As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
T.S. ELIOT
I grow old . . . I grow old . . . / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
T.S. ELIOT
Where is wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T.S. ELIOT
I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
T.S. ELIOT
War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.
T.S. ELIOT
Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.
T.S. ELIOT
It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lov...
T.S. ELIOT
April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirrin...
T.S. ELIOT
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
T.S. ELIOT
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; / Am an attendant lord.
T.S. ELIOT
To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is eno...
T.S. ELIOT
So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are...
T.S. ELIOT
For I have known them all already, know them all -- have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I...
T.S. ELIOT
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
T.S. ELIOT
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, / And in short, I was afraid.
T.S. ELIOT
It's not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them.
T.S. ELIOT
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of pe...
T.S. ELIOT
The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future o...
T.S. ELIOT
No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.
T.S. ELIOT
So I find words I never thought to speak

In streets I never thought I should revisit
T.S. ELIOT
Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird meaning death
T.S. ELIOT
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And a hundred visions and revisions
T.S. ELIOT
Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance
T.S. ELIOT
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to m...
T.S. ELIOT
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T.S. ELIOT
Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the publ...
T.S. ELIOT
In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in.
T.S. ELIOT
that which is only living
Can only die
T.S. ELIOT
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal seren...
T.S. ELIOT
Time present and time past / are both perhaps present in time future.
T.S. ELIOT
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; ...
T.S. ELIOT
At the still point, there the dance is.
T.S. ELIOT
What the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication<...
T.S. ELIOT
I do not know much about gods;but I think that the river is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and i...
T.S. ELIOT
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.
T.S. ELIOT
Or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the musi...
T.S. ELIOT
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
T.S. ELIOT
All time is unreedemable.
T.S. ELIOT
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it...
T.S. ELIOT
Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear...
T.S. ELIOT
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
T.S. ELIOT
There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same h...
T.S. ELIOT
The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presenc...
T.S. ELIOT
Only through time time is conquered
T.S. ELIOT
I am glad you have a Cat, but I do not believe it is So remarkable a cat as My Cat.
T.S. ELIOT
time past and time future
what might have been and what has been
point to one end, which i...
T.S. ELIOT
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive whe...
T.S. ELIOT
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the year...
T.S. ELIOT
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues ...
T.S. ELIOT
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contain...
T.S. ELIOT
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
T.S. ELIOT
Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, in...
T.S. ELIOT
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
T.S. ELIOT
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter
T.S. ELIOT
You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends, and how, how rare and strange it is, to find i...
T.S. ELIOT
My name is only an anagram of toilets.
T.S. ELIOT
For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice....
T.S. ELIOT
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, / Glowed on the marble.
T.S. ELIOT
When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives hi...
T.S. ELIOT
What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?
T.S. ELIOT
This love is silent.
T.S. ELIOT
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form ...
T.S. ELIOT
You are the music while the music lasts.
T.S. ELIOT
If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, you must accept the terms it offers ...
T.S. ELIOT
The winter evening settles down / With smell of steaks in passage ways.
T.S. ELIOT
Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right; decide on what you think is right and stick to it.
T.S. ELIOT
Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
T.S. ELIOT
Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, adv...
T.S. ELIOT
The river is within us, the sea is all about us; The sea is the land's edge also
T.S. ELIOT
When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our se...
T.S. ELIOT
Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.
T.S. ELIOT
Footfalls echo in the memory, Down the passage which we did not take, Towards the door we never open...
T.S. ELIOT
Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.
T.S. ELIOT
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of pe...
T.S. ELIOT
In my beginning is my end.
T.S. ELIOT
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T.S. ELIOT
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T.S. ELIOT
It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the 'dear dece...
T.S. ELIOT
Donne, I suppose, was such another / Who found no substitute for sense. / To seize and clutch and pe...
T.S. ELIOT
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
T.S. ELIOT
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids/Sprouting despondently at area gates.
T.S. ELIOT
Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers.
T.S. ELIOT
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and ye...
T.S. ELIOT
The wounded surgeon plies the steel / That questions the distempered part.
T.S. ELIOT
We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none t...
T.S. ELIOT
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
T.S. ELIOT
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...
T.S. ELIOT
I do not approve the extermination of the enemy; the policy of exterminating or, as it is barbarousl...
T.S. ELIOT
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...
T.S. ELIOT
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 ...
T.S. ELIOT
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
Before a Cat will condescend
To treat you as a trusted friend,
Some little token of esteem...
T.S. ELIOT
The Pekes and the Pollicles, everyone knows,
Are proud and implacable, passionate foes;
I...
T.S. ELIOT
The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may...
T.S. ELIOT
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...
T.S. ELIOT
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