T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot OMwas an American-born British essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic and "one of the twentieth century's major poets". He moved to England in 1914 at age 25, settling, working and marrying there. He was eventually naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39, renouncing his American citizenship...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth26 September 1888
CountryUnited States of America
travel adventure science
The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started.
hope taken men
One thing you cannot know: The sudden extinction of every alternative, The unexpected crash of the iron cataract. You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it. You only know what it is not to hope: You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless Unrecognized by other men, though sometimes by each other.
music dope jazz-and-life
You are the music while the music lasts.
unique feelings immature
The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.
war may ignored
War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.
girl sea voice
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us... and we drown.
self may patterns
History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
meditation waiting thyme
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.
believe successful reality
To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now.
voice singing emptiness
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
basketball individual-talent want
If you want it you must obtain it by great labor.
life moving dark
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.
moments difficulty permanent
Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.
action one-time
What is true, is true only for one time and only for one place.