T. S. Eliot Quotes

1888–1965 England

Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965) was an American-born English poet, dramatist and literary critic. Noted for spiritual and religious themes in many of his poems, he converted from Unitarianism to Anglicanism in 1927.

England
Academics
Critics
Essayists
Nobel laureates

Also known as: Eliot, T. S., Eliot, Thomas Stearns, T S Eliot, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Stearne Eliot, Thomas Stearns Eliot

Random T. S. Eliot quote

188 quotes

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

I am glad you have a Cat, but I do not believe it is So remarkable a cat as My Cat. My Cat is a Lilliecat Hubvously. What a lilliecat it is. There never was such a Lilliecat. Its Name is Jellyorum and its one Idea is to be Useful!!

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

The Hollow Men (1925)

Where the bricks are fallen
We will build with new stone
Where the beams are rotten
We will build with new timbers
Where the word is unspoken
We will build with new speech
There is work together
A Church for all
And a job for each
Every man to his work.

Choruses from The Rock (1934)

Who is the third who walks always beside you
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you

The Waste Land (1922)

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.
Men have left God not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has never happened before
That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason,
And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic.

Choruses from The Rock (1934)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: T. S. Eliot (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.