T. S. Eliot

“It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.”

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.”

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

“Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.”

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

“And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You are not here to verify,instruct yourself, or inform curiosityor carry report. You are here to kneelwhere prayer has been valid. And prayer is more than an order of words, the conscious occupation of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.”

“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.'”

“Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.”

“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.”

“There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.”

“April is the cruellest month.”

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

“How wild it was, to let it be.”

“There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.”