224 Quotes by T.S. Eliot

I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man

If time and space, as sages say,Are things which cannot be,The sun which does not feel decayNo greater is than we.So why, Love, should we ever prayTo live a century?The butterfly that lives a dayHas lived eternity.

When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city ?Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”What will you answer? “We all dwell togetherTo make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

A martyrdom is always the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways. It is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, and who no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of being a martyr.

For I have known them all already, known them all—Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Our second danger is to associate tradition with the immovable; to think of it as something hostile to all change; to aim to return to some previous condition which we imagine as having been capable of preservation in perpetuity, instead of aiming to stimulate the life which produced that condition in its time. . . . a tradition without intelligence is not worth having . . .