Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.
T. S. Eliot
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
T. S. Eliot
Age: 76 †
Born: 1888
Born: September 26
Died: 1965
Died: January 4
Critic
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Lyricist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Social Critic
St. Louis
Missouri
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Eliot
T S Eliot
Thomas Eliot
T.S. Eliot
Violate
Observe
Rebellion
Rules
Wise
More quotes by T. S. Eliot
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.
T. S. Eliot
The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity, sluggish and indomitable as a glacier, will mitigate the most violent, and depress the most exalted revolution.
T. S. Eliot
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
T. S. Eliot
Cats must have three names-an everyday name, such as Peter a more particular, dignified name, such as Quaxo, Bombalurina, or Jellylorum and, thirdly, the name the cat thinks up for himself, his deep and inscrutable singular Name.
T. S. Eliot
Because I know that time is always time and place is always place and only place. And what is actual is actual only for one time. And only for one place. I rejoice that things are as they are.
T. S. Eliot
In my beginning is my end.
T. S. Eliot
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T. S. Eliot
As a rule, with me an unfinished [idea] is a thing that might as well be rubbed out. It's better, if there's something good in it that I might make use of elsewhere, to leave it at the back of my mind than on paper in a drawer. If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing but if it's in the memory it becomes transformed into something else.
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
We see the light but see not whence it comes. O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!
T. S. Eliot
The old should be explorers, be curious, risk transgression, explore oldness itself.
T. S. Eliot
Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove.
T. S. Eliot
And they write innumerable books being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.
T. S. Eliot
If time and space, as sages say, Are things which cannot be, The sun which does not feel decay No greater is than we. So why, Love, should we ever pray To live a century? The butterfly that lives a day Has lived eternity.
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
The nightingales are singing near The Convent of the Sacred Heart, And sang within the bloody wood When Agamemnon cried aloud, And let their liquid siftings fall To stain the stiff dishonored shroud.
T. S. Eliot
O father, father Gone from us, lost to us, The church lies bereft, Alone, Desecrated, desolated. And the heathen shall build On the ruins Their world without God. I see it. I see it.
T. S. Eliot
We fight to keep something alive rather than in the expectation that anything will triumph.
T. S. Eliot
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
T. S. Eliot
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless Neither from nor towards at the still point, there the dance is.
T. S. Eliot