Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) was an American-born British poet, critic, and playwright. He was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature and the Order of Merit in 1948.
Born in St Louis, Missouri, and educated at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford’s Merton College, Eliot is associated with the rise of literary modernism. His landmark poem, The Waste Land (1922,) was one of the central literary landmarks of the 20th century.
In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen. His increasing involvement with Christianity is chronicled in his poetry through The Hollow Men (1925,) The Journey of the Magi (1927,) Ash-Wednesday (1930) and climaxing in Four Quartets (1935–42,) the latter regarded by many scholars as his greatest poetic statement.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by T. S. Eliot
You are the music while the music lasts.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Music
War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: War
To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Value of Time, Happiness, Time Management
It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored in climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Happiness, Acceptance
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
Topics: Age, Aging
An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing
In my end is my beginning.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Death, Beginning, Dying, Ending
The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Life
There are flood and drought over the eyes and in the mouth, dead water and dead sand contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil gapes at the vanity of toil, laughs without mirth. This is the death of the earth.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Food
What is true, is true only for one time and only for one place.
—T. S. Eliot
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Poetry, Language
The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Right, Goodness, Good Deeds, Deeds
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Words
It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good.
—T. S. Eliot
Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Television
Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Humility
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.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Writing, Perspective
April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Rain, Spring, Seasons
Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important … they do not mean to do harm … they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Worth, Greatness, Responsibility, Consequences
When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Books, Literature
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 human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Thought, Reason, Evil
I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Poets, Poetry
Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Art, Arts, Artists
For every life and every act consequence of good and evil can be shown and as in time results of many deeds are blended so good and evil in the end become confounded.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Consequences
One starts an action simply because one must do something.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Secrets of Success, Motivation
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 we have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Poets, Poetry, Art
You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends, and how, how rare and strange it is, to find in a life composed so much of odds and ends … to find a friend who has these qualities, who has, and gives those qualities upon which friendship lives. How much it means that I say this to you—without these friendships—life, what cauchemar!
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Friendship
Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think; whatever you want, be sure that is what you want; whatever you feel, be sure that is what you feel.
—T. S. Eliot
Hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Hell
A book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.
—T. S. Eliot
Topics: Books
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