Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. – T. S. Eliot Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, I.
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. – T. S. Eliot
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. – T. S. Eliot
The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason. – T. S. Eliot
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. – T. S. Eliot
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves. – T. S. Eliot
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
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. – T. S. Eliot
O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. – T. S. Eliot
There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled. – T. S. Eliot
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 who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. – T. S. Eliot
Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment. – T. S. Eliot
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? – T. S. Eliot
