Top 70 Quotes by T. S. Eliot

O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.

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

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 last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

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.

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.

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.

It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.