T S Eliot Love Quotes and Sayings

T S Eliot Love Quotes and Sayings

#1-2 The Elder Statesman

1. Oh my dear, I love you to the limits of speech, and beyond.
It’s strange that words are so inadequate.
Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath,
So the lover must struggle for words.

2. But there’s no vocabulary
For love within a family, love that’s lived in
But not looked at, love within the light of which
All else is seen, the love within which
All other love finds speech.
This love is silent.

#3 East Coker, Quartet 2, Four Quartets

3. I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
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.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

#4 A Dedication to My Wife

4. Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other
Who think the same thoughts without need of speech
And babble the same speech without need of meaning.

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Except from Wikipedia: Thomas Stearns Eliot, Order of Merit (26 September 1888–4 January 1965), was a poet, playwright, and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Among his most famous writings are The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, “The Hollow Men”, Ash Wednesday, Four Quartets, Murder in the Cathedral, The Cocktail Party and “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats”.
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Sayings by T S Eliot

#1-2 The Cocktail Party

1. 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.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it
Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
To think well of themselves.

2. You will have to live with these memories and make
them
Into something new. Only by acceptance
Of the past will you alter its meaning.

#3 East Coker, Quartet 2, Four Quartets

3. You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again?
In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

#4 Knowledge and Experience in the philosophy of F. H. Bradley

4. 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. But it should be obvious also that we can explain the passion equally well: it is no more ‘subjective’, because some persons have never experienced it, than light is subjective because the blind cannot see.

#5 Transit of Venus: Poems by Harry Crosby, Preface, 1931

5. Of course one can ‘go too far’ and except in directions in which we can go too far there is no interest in going at all; and only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out just how far one can go.

#6 T S Eliot, Address to the Milton Academy Class of ’33, 17 June 1933 [S]

6. Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think; whatever you want, be sure that is what you want; whatever you feel, be sure that is what you feel.

#7 The Family Reunion

7. And people to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.

#8 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

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

#9-10 Little Gidding, 1942, Four Quartets

9. 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.

10. 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.

#11 II, Little Gidding, Four Quartets

11. For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.

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Unsourced T S Eliot Quotes

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.