813 Quotes by T. S. Eliot

Without Christianity we might, of course, merely sink into an apathetic decline.

Every street lamp that I pass Beats like a fatalistic drum, And through the spaces of the dark Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

I have gone at dusk through narrow streets and watched the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men leaning out of windows.

I must tell you that I should really like to think there’s something wrong with me- Because, if there isn’t, then there’s something wrong with the world itself-and that’s much more frightening! That would be terrible. So I’d rather believe there is something wrong with me, that could be put right.

Because the particular has no language. One thinks to escape.

There is no water, so things are bad. If there were water, it would be better. But there is no water.

Death! I had not thought Death had undone so many.

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.

And when all the world came back And the light crept up between the shutters, And you heard the sparrows in the gutters, You had such a vision of the street As the street hardly understands;.