T. S. Eliot Life Quotations

My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand.

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light. We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and ecstasy is too much pain.

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

It is worth dying to find out what life is.

It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.

You are the music while the music lasts.

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.

life is long between the desire and the spasm.

Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives.

Birth, and copulation, and death; that's all the facts when you come to brass tacks.

Can we only love Something created in our own imaginations?

The single Rose Is now the Garden Where all loves end

Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and undesiring Except in the aspect of time Caught in the form of limitation Between un-being and being.

Lady of silences Calm and distressed Torn and most whole Rose of memory Rose of forgetfulness Exhausted and life-giving Worried reposeful The single Rose Is now the Garden Where all loves end Terminate torment Of love unsatisfied The greater torment Of love satisfied End of the endless Journey to no end Conclusion of all that Is inconclusible Speech without word and Word of no speech Grace to the Mother For the Garden Where all love ends.

You can evade life, but you can not evade Death.

Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is a life.

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Finding a way to live the simple life is one of life's supreme complications.

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.

Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter.

Can we only love Something created in our own imaginations? Are we all in fact unloving and unloveable? Then one is alone, and if one is alone Then lover and beloved are equally unreal And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams.

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.

The fool,fixed in his folly,may think He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws? She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?