T. S. Eliot

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm, retreating to the corner of arm and knee, eager to be reassured, taking pleasure in the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree.

People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.

Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.

There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

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?

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

Home is where one starts from.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.