T.S. Eliot

"The love of tradition does not mean the love of the ash heap."

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

"The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not yet old enough to turn them down on the grounds of age."

"Distracted from distraction by distraction."

"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."

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

"If you haven't lost your temper, the day is wasted."

"April is the cruellest month."

"Do I dare disturb the universe?"

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."

"In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."

"We are dying, each of us, all the time. Shall we not, rather, die with enthusiasm?"

"The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good—in spite of all the people who say he is very good."

"Friendship is a two-sided affair."

"Knowledge is not something to which we can add new information."

"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."

"Hell is oneself."

"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins."

"Birth, and copulation, and death. That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks."

"To do the useful thing, to say the effective thing, to live the admirable life—these are aims for the mediocre."

"The more we know of other languages, the better we understand our own."

"There is no such thing as a lost cause because there is no such thing as a gained one."

"The intellect is impoverished by what it has learnt."

"Mankind cannot bear very much reality."

"I am not sure that intelligence and a religious faith are compatible."

"All our knowledge begins with the senses."

"You are the music while the music lasts."

"One does not so much arrive at a decision as become aware of it."

"To be alone is to be different, and to be different is to be alone."