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When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom, the work is likely to sprawl.

T. S. Eliot

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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
Freedom
Framework
Given
Strict
Ideas
Forced
Work
Total
Likely
Sprawl
Produce
Taxed
Imagination
Richest
Within
Utmost

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Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.
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When the whole world is running headlong towards the precipice, one who walks in the opposite direction is looked at as being crazy.
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There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.
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I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
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If you want it you must obtain it by great labor.
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Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative.
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And would it have been worth it, after all, Would it have been worth while, After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor - And this, and so much more? -
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The lot of man is ceaseless labor, Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder.
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We can at least try to understand our own motives, passions, and prejudices, so as to be conscious of what we are doing when we apeal to those of others. This is very difficult, because our own prejudice and emotional bias always seems to us so rational.
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