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.
T. S. Eliot
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
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.
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?
The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
You are the music while the music lasts.
If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.
I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.
I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.
Home is where one starts from.
Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?
Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
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.
Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.
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.
My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.
It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.
Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.
In my beginning is my end.
It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.
There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.
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.
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.
Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.
This love is silent.
O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.
People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.
So the lover must struggle for words.
There is no method but to be very intelligent.
Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.
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.
The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.
