T.S. Eliot's “Genuine poetry [that] can communicate before it is understood.” 

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

“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.” 

“Do I dare 
Disturb the universe? 
In a minute there is time 
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” 

“Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.” 


“For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” 

“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.” 

“If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?” 

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” 
“Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.” 

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

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning."

“Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity” 

“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 emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.” 

“Half 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.” 

“The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
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 cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.” 

“Success is relative. It is what we make of the mess we have made of things.” 

“I learn a great deal by merely observing you, and letting you talk as long as you please, and taking note of what you do not say.” 

“There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.” 

"We don't actually fear death, we fear that no one will notice our absence, that we will disappear without a trace.” 

“An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry. ” 

“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 purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.” 

“We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.” 

“music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but
you are the music
While the music lasts.”

“Men dislike being awakened from their death in life.” 

“Where is the Life we lost in living?” 

“To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now.” 

“People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.” 

“Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other 
Who think the same thoughts without need of speech” 

“The journey, Not the destination matters...” 

“We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.” 

“All cases are unique, and very similar to others.” 

“I learn a good deal by merely observing you,
And letting you talk as long as you please,
And taking note of what you do not say.” 

“I've been born, and once is enough.”