813 Quotes by T. S. Eliot

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

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.

The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in the end it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it. At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means?

Justice itself tends to be corrupted by political passion.

If you want it you must obtain it by great labor.

What we know of other people's only our memory of the moments during which we knew them.

Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. Old men ought to be explorers Here or there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise.

They don't understand what it is to be awake, / To be living on several planes at once / Though one cannot speak with several voices at once.