188 quotes
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.
There will be time to murder and create.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.
Ash-Wednesday (1930)
The author of Biographia Literaria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a "ruined man" is itself a vocation.
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.
The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have three different names.
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)
He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare:
At whatever time the deed took place-
Macavity wasn't there.
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)
What have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards in an age which advances progressively backwards?
Choruses from The Rock (1934)
April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.
Much to cast down, much to build, much to restore.
Choruses from The Rock (1934)
Ambition fortifies the will of man to become ruler over other men: it operates with deception, cajolery, and violence, it is the action of impurity upon impurity.
Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
Atheism should always be encouraged (i.e. rationalistic not emotional atheism) for the sake of the Faith.
Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
An old man in a draughty house
Under a windy knob.
Poems (1920)
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Choruses from The Rock (1934)
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.
The Hollow Men (1925)
Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin
Poems (1920)
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
In the vacant places
We will build with new bricks
Choruses from The Rock (1934)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)