Thomas Stearns Eliot citáty

„Lidstvo nedokáže snášet krutou realitu.“

„Dělat užitečnou věc, říkat odvážnou věc, přemýšlet o krásné věci: to stačí pro život jednoho člověka.“

„Někdy se věci stanou možnými, pokud je dostatečně chceme.“

„Samotná existence knihoven poskytuje nejlepší důkaz, že ještě můžeme mít naději pro budoucnost člověka.“

„Většinu zla na tomto světě páchají lidé s dobrými úmysly.“

„Rány v srdci, i když se časem zahojí, jsou na člověku po celý život znatelné.“

„Životu se lze vyhnout, smrti však ne.“

„Světlo, viditelná upomínka na neviditelné světlo.“

„Když nepřesáhneš sám sebe, odkud zjistíš, jak jsi vysoký?“

„Lidstvo nesnese příliš mnoho reality.“

„Milovat se s ženou v duchu je to nejideálnější milostné spojení dvou vyhraněných individualit.“

„Pohlavní vzdechy jsou součástí nesmrtelných myšlenek.“

„Nesmíme přestat hledat. Na konci našeho hledání dospějeme tam, kde jsme začínali, a bude to, jako kdybychom tam byli poprvé.“

„Někdy se věci, které šíleně chceme, stanou možnými.“

„Já ho nečtu, na to ho mám příliš rád.“

„Nezralí básníci napodobují, zralí básníci kradou.“

„Organizace je právě tak nutná jako inspirace.“

„Nezralí básníci napodobují, zkušení kradou. Ti špatní znetvoří, co si vezmou, zatímco dobří z toho udělají něco lepšího, nebo alespoň jiného. Skutečný básník zvládne svou kořist naroubovat do jedinečné koruny pocitů, zcela odlišné od té, ze které si svůj roub uštípl.“

„Dokud hudba trvá, jste hudbou vy.“

„Pokud toho nemáš až nad hlavu, jak vlastně víš, jak vysoký jsi?“

„Pravá poezie dokáže komunikovat dříve, než je pochopena.“

„Ukážu ti strach v hrsti prachu.“

„Svět se točí a svět se mění, ale jedna věc se nemění. Jedna věc se za všechna ta léta nezměnila. Ať už to maskujete jakkoli, tato věc se nemění: věčný boj Dobra a Zla.“

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in infomation?”

“Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.”

“Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long.”

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.”

“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”

“Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year…”

“The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change,
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.”

“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”

“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.”

“Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

“Unreal friendship may turn to real
But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended”

“Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.”

“This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.”

“What happens when a new work of art is created, is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.”

“Success is relative. It is what we make of the mess we have made of things.”

“Some one said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know.”

“We ask only to be reassured
About the noises in the cellar
And the window that should not have been open”

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”

“Who is the third who walks always 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”

“You now have learned enough to see
That Cats are much like you and me
And other people whom we find
Possessed of various types of mind.
For some are sane and some are mad
And some are good and some are bad
And some are better, some are worse —
But all may be described in verse.”

“O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.”

“Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care”

“Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom.”

“Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying”

“April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”

“For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

“The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man”

“What is hell? 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.”