T.S. Eliot

"The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink."

"Art is the escape from personality."

"To arrive where you started, you must follow a circuitous route."

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become absolutely free, or die."

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is even understood."

"Art is our defense against chaos."

"The purpose of poetry is a place where the human spirit can rest."

"I have known the arms already known, in the rooms; yet we miss each other."

"Do not ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

"The responsibility of the writer is not primarily to society but to himself."

"Art is the complement of nature."

"Belief is believing what you do not yet understand."

"The greatest love is above the law."

"Poetry is not meant to be dead on the page."

"Fear in a handful of dust represents our deepest anxieties."

"The perfection of art is patience."

"One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often."

"The mind of any thinking man is too coarse to fix the quality of beauty."

"Loneliness and solitude are the same thing, only one feels better than the other."

"We shall never cease from exploration until we return where we started."

"The greatest thing a human soul ever does is to see something and tell what it saw."

"Personal intercourse, and that only, makes account of ideas."

"Every moment is tragic and every moment is comic."

"The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates."

"Only in a world of thought does perfectibility exist."

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."

"To know oneself, one should assert oneself."

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."

"The only way out is through."

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started."