When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

— T.S. Eliot

When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city ? Do you huddle close together because you love each other?” What will you answer? “We all dwell together To make money from each other”? Or “This is a community”? Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger. Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

— T.S. Eliot

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

— T.S. Eliot

Who is the third who always walks beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrap in a brown mantle, hooded do not know whether a man or a woman-But who is that on the other side of you?

— T.S. Eliot

Will the veiled sister pray for Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee, Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray For children at the gate Who will not go away and cannot pray: Pray for those who chose and oppose

— T.S. Eliot

With Cats, some say, one rule is true:Don’t speak till you are spoken to. Myself, I do not hold with that —I say, you should ad-dress a Cat. But always keep in mind that he Resents familiarity. I bow, and taking off my hat, Ad-dress him in this form: O Cat! But if he is the Cat next door, Whom I have often met before (He comes to see me in my flat)I greet him with an oops Cat! I think I've heard them call him James —But we've not got so far as names.

— T.S. Eliot

You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure, That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.

— T.S. Eliot

You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends, And how, how rare and strange it is, to finding a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends, (For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? You are not blind! How keen you are!) To find a friend who has these qualities, Who has, and gives Those qualities upon which friendship lives. How much it means that I say this to you-Without these friendships-life, what catcher!

— T.S. Eliot

You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; They called me the hyacinth girl.' —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. OD' UND leer was Meet.

— T.S. Eliot

Your burden is not to clear your conscience But to learn how to bear the burdens on your conscience.

— T.S. Eliot