For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
— T. S. Eliot
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.
A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.
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.
Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
This love is silent.
If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby 'it.'
In my beginning is my end.
April is the cruellest month.
Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?
The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.
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?
Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.
There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords.
O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.
There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.
There is no method but to be very intelligent.
People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.
Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.
Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.
Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm, retreating to the corner of arm and knee, eager to be reassured, taking pleasure in the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree.
A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.
The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself.
And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.
Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.
It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.
The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.
So the lover must struggle for words.
The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
Business today consists in persuading crowds.
Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.
