Hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.
T. S. Eliot
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
T. S. Eliot
Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.
T. S. Eliot
I suppose some editors are failed writers; but so are most writers.
T. S. Eliot
For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice.
T. S. Eliot
The process of advancement is interesting: it isn't that you get bigger to fit the world; the world gets smaller to fit you.
T. S. Eliot
We must believe that ''emotion recollected in tranquillity'' is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not ''recollected'' and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is ''tranquil'' only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.
T. S. Eliot
In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
T. S. Eliot
And what the dead had no speech for, when living, they can tell you, being dead: the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
T. S. Eliot
April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.
T. S. Eliot
It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.