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…forgive Us, O Lord, We Acknowledge Ourselves As Type Of The Common Man, Of The Men And Women Who Shut The Door And Sit By The Fire; Who Fear The Blessing Of God, The Loneliness Of The Night Of God, The Surrender Required, The Deprivation Inflicted; Who Fear The Injustice Of Men Less Than The Justice Of God; Who Fear The Hand At The Window, The Fire In The Thatch, The Fist In The Tavern, The Push Into The Canal, Less Than We Fear The Love Of God.

-T. S. Eliot

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…forgive Us, O Lord,

T. S. Eliot

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…forgive Us, O Lord, We Acknowledge Ourselves As Type Of The Common Man, Of The Men And Women Who Shut The Door And Sit By The Fire; Who Fear The Blessing Of God, The Loneliness Of The Night Of God, The Surrender Required, The Deprivation Inflicted; Who Fear The Injustice Of Men Less Than The Justice Of God; Who Fear The Hand At The Window, The Fire In The Thatch, The Fist In The Tavern, The Push Into The Canal, Less Than We Fear The Love Of God.

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Fare Forward, Travellers! Not Escaping From The Past Into Different Lives, Or Into Any Future; You Are Not The Same People Who Left That Station Or Who Will Arrive At Any Terminus, While The Narrowing Rails Slide Together Behind You.

Winter Kept Us Warm, Covering Earth In Forgetful Snow

And Indeed There Will Be Time To Wonder, "do I Dare?" And, "do I Dare?" Time To Turn Back And Descend The Stair, With A Bald Spot In The Middle Of My Hair.

And Voices Singing Out Of Empty Cisterns And Exhausted Wells.

The Rum Turn Tugger Is A Terrible Bore: When You Let Him In, Then He Wants To Be Out; He's Always On The Wrong Side Of Every Door, And As Soon As He's At Home, Then He'd Like To Get About.

Never Commit Yourself To A Cheese Without Having First Examined It.

Dear Mother, I Am Getting On Nicely In My Work At The Bank, And Like It ... I Want To Find Out Something About The Science Of Money While I Am At It; It Is An Extraordinarily Interesting Subject.

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 Dripping Blood Our Only Drink, The Bloody Flesh Our Only Food: In Spite Of Which We Like To Think That We Are Sound, Substantial Flesh And Blood Again, In Spite Of That, We Call This Friday Good.

People Find A Way In Which They Can Say Something.

These Are Only Hints And Guesses, Hints Followed By Guesses; And The Rest Is Prayer, Observance, Discipline, Thought And Action.

Can We Only Love Something Created In Our Own Imaginations? Are We All In Fact Unloving And Unloveable? Then One Is Alone, And If One Is Alone Then Lover And Beloved Are Equally Unreal And The Dreamer Is No More Real Than His Dreams.

It Is In Fact A Part Of The Function Of Education To Help Us Escape, Not From Our Own Time - For We Are Bound By That - But From The Intellectual And Emotional Limitations Of Our Time.

Only Through Time Time Is Conquered

You Will Find That You Survive Humiliation. And That's An Experience Of Incalculable Value.

Thought Provoking

I Don't Believe One Grows Older. I Think That What Happens Early On In Life Is That At A Certain Age One Stands Still And Stagnates.

Hungry Hatred, Will Not Strive Against Intelligence Self-interest.

There Will Be Time To Murder And Create.

One Thing You Cannot Know: The Sudden Extinction Of Every Alternative, The Unexpected Crash Of The Iron Cataract. You Do Not Know What Hope Is, Until You Have Lost It. You Only Know What It Is Not To Hope: You Do Not Know What It Is To Have Hope Taken From You Or To Fling It Away, To Join The Legion Of The Hopeless Unrecognized By Other Men, Though Sometimes By Each Other.

Half Of The Harm That Is Done In This World Is Due To People Who Want To Feel Important. They Don't Mean To Do Harm. But The Harm Does Not Interest Them.

[on The Waste Land:] Various Critics Have Done Me The Honor To Interpret The Poem In Terms Of Criticism Of The Contemporary World, Have Considered It, Indeed, As An Important Bit Of Social Criticism. To Me It Was Only The Relief Of A Personal And Wholly Insignificant Grouse Against Life; It Is Just A Piece Of Rhythmical Grumbling.

This Is One Moment, / But Know That Another / Shall Pierce You With A Sudden Painful Joy.

He Who Was Living Is Now Dead We Who Were Living Are Now Dying With A Little Patience.

That Is Not It At All, That Is Not What I Meant, At All.

What We Know Of Other People's Only Our Memory Of The Moments During Which We Knew Them.

Cocktail Parties

Till Human Voices Wake Us, And We Drown.

I Have Seen The Moment Of My Greatness Flicker, And I Have Seen The Eternal Footman Hold My Coat, And Snicker, And In Short, I Was Afraid.

The Greatest Proof Of Christianity For Others Is Not How Far A Man Can Logically Analyze His Reasons For Believing, But How Far In Practice He Will Stake His Life On His Belief.

Probably, Indeed, The Larger Part Of The Labor Of An Author Composing His Work Is Critical Labor; The Labor Of Sifting, Combining, Constructing, Expunging, Correcting, Testing. This Frightful Toil Is As Much Critical As Creative.

The Tiger Springs In The New Year. Us He Devours.

My Nerves Are Bad To-night. Yes, Bad. Stay With Me. 'speak To Me. Why Do You Never Speak? Speak. 'what Are You Thinking Of? What Thinking? What? 'i Never Know What You Are Thinking. Think.

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 Significant Truths Are Private Truths. As They Become Public They Cease To Become Truths; They Become Facts, Or At Best, Part Of The Public Character; Or At Worst, Catchwords.

Love Is Most Nearly Itself When Here And Now Cease To Matter.

It Is Generally A Feminine Eye That First Detects The Moral Deficiencies Hidden Under The 'dear Deceit' Of Beauty.

A Toothache, Or A Violent Passion, Is Not Necessarily Diminished By Our Knowledge Of Its Causes, Its Character, Its Importance Or Insignificance.

We Have All Our Private Terrors, Our Particular Shadows, Our Secret Fears. We Are Afraid In A Fear Which We Cannot Face, Which None Understands, And Our Hearts Are Torn From Us, Our Brains Unskinned Like The Layers Of An Onion, Ourselves The Last.

But The Church Cannot Be, In Any Political Sense, Either Conservative Or Liberal, Or Revolutionary. Conservatism Is Too Often Conservation Of The Wrong Things: Liberalism A Relaxation Of Discipline; Revolution A Denial Of The Permanent Things.

Those Who Arrive At The End Of The Journey Are Not Those Who Began.

I Said To My Soul, Be Still, And Wait Without Hope, For Hope Would Be Hope For The Wrong Thing.

I Would Meet You Upon This Honestly. I That Was Near Your Heart Was Removed Therefrom To Lose Beauty In Terror, Terror In Inquisition. I Have Lost My Passion: Why Should I Need To Keep It Since What Is Kept Must Be Adulterated? I Have Lost My Sight, Smell, Hearing, Taste And Touch: How Should I Use Them For Your Closer Contact?

For Most Of Us, There Is Only The Unattended Moment, The Moment In And Out Of Time, The Distraction Fit, Lost In A Shaft Of Sunlight, The Wild Thyme Unseen, Or The Winter Lightning Or The Waterfall, Or Music Heard So Deeply That It Is Not Heard At All, But You Are The Music While The Music Lasts

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. Through The Unknown, Remembered Gate When The Last Of Earth Left To Discover Is That Which Was The Beginning; At The Source Of The Longest River The Voice Of The Hidden Waterfall And The Children In The Apple-tree Not Known, Because Not Looked For But Heard, Half-heard, In The Stillness Between Two Waves Of The Sea.

Dayodhuam: I Have Heard The Key Turn In The Door Once And Turn Once Only We Think Of The Key, Each In His Prison Thinking Of The Key, Each Confirms A Prison.

Our Emotions Are Only “incidents” In The Effort To Keep Day And Night Together.

What Is True, Is True Only For One Time And Only For One Place.

So First, Your Memory I'll Jog, And Say: A Cat Is Not A Dog

If Time And Space, As Sages Say, Are Things Which Cannot Be, The Sun Which Does Not Feel Decay No Greater Is Than We. So Why, Love, Should We Ever Pray To Live A Century? The Butterfly That Lives A Day Has Lived Eternity.

Those Who Talk Of The Bible As A Monument Of English Prose Are Merely Admiring It As A Monument Over The Grave Of Christianity.

We Had The Experience But Missed The Meaning. And Approach To The Meaning Restores The Experience In A Different Form.

Turning Wearily, As One Would Turn To Nod Goodbye To Rochefoucauld, If The Street Were Time And He As The End Of The Street.

Do I Dare Disturb The Universe? In A Minute There Is Time For Decisions And Revisions Which A Minute Will Reverse.

To Men Of A Certain Type The Suspicion That They Are Incapable Of Loving Is As Disturbing To Their Self-esteem As, In Cruder Men, The Fear Of Impotence.

All Time Is Unreedemable.

Any Religion Is Forever In Danger Of Petrifaction Into Mere Ritual And Habit, Though Ritual And Habit Be Essential To Religion.

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.

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.

I Believe The Moment Of Birth Is When We Have Knowledge Of Death I Believe The Season Of Birth Is The Season Of Sacrifice.

This Is The Feeling For Syllable And Rhythm, Penetrating Far Below The Conscious Levels Of Thought And Feeling, Invigorating Every Word.

Poetry Is Not An Assertion Of Truth, But The Making Of That Truth More Fully Real To Us.

Where Is The Knowledge We Have Lost In Information?

Too Much Information

...the Still Point In A Turning World.

Shall I Part My Hair Behind? Do I Dare To Eat A Peach?

If We All Were Judged According To The Consequences Of All Our Words And Deeds, Beyond The Intention And Beyond Our Limited Understanding Of Ourselves And Others, We Should All Be Condemned.

To Country People Cows Are Mild, And Flee From Any Stick They Throw; But I’m A Timid Town Bred Child, And All The Cattle Seem To Know.

No! I Am Not Prince Hamlet, Nor Was Meant To Be; Am An Attendant Lord, One That Will Do To Swell A Progress, Start A Scene Or Two, Advise The Prince; No Doubt, An Easy Tool, Deferential, Glad To Be Of Use, Politic, Cautious, And Meticulous; Full Of High Sentence, But A Bit Obtuse; At Times, Indeed, Almost Ridiculous— Almost, At Times, The Fool.

There Is No Escape From Metre; There Is Only Mastery.

Our Lives Are Mostly A Constant Evasion Of Ourselves, And Of Our Visible, Sensible World.

Where Shall The Word Be Found, Where Will The Word / Resound? Not Here, There Is Not Enough Silence.

The Bad Poet Is Usually Unconscious Where He Ought To Be Conscious, And Conscious Where He Ought To Be Unconscious.

Our Difficulties Of The Moment Must Always Be Dealt With Somehow, But Our Permanent Difficulties Are Difficulties Of Every Moment.

And The Lost Heart Stiffens And Rejoices In The Lost Lilac And The Lost Sea Voices And The Weak Spirit Quickens To Rebel For The Bent Golden-rod And The Lost Sea Smell Quickens To Recover.

Although I Do Not Hope To Turn Again Although I Do Not Hope Although I Do Not Hope To Turn

We Should Not Confuse Information With Knowledge.

A Book Is Not Harmless Merely Because No One Is Consciously Offended By It.

Home Is Where One Starts From. As We Grow Older The World Becomes Stranger, The Pattern More Complicatied Of Dead And Living, Not The Intense Moment Isolated, With No Before And After, But A Lifetime Burning In Every Moment . . .

Intense Moments

Anxiety Is The Hand Maiden Of Creativity.

If You Aren't In Over Your Head, How Do You Know How Tall You Are?

And Now You Live Dispersed On Ribbon Roads, And No Man Knows Or Cares Who Is His Neighbor Unless His Neighbor Makes Too Much Disturbance, But All Dash To And Fro In Motor Cars, Familiar With The Roads And Settled Nowhere.

It's Not Wise To Violate Rules Until You Know How To Observe Them.

Yet With These April Sunsets, That Somehow Recall My Buried Life, And Paris In The Spring, I Feel Immeasurably At Peace, And Find The World To Be Wonderful And Youthful Afterall

Envy Is Everywhere. Who Is Without Envy? And Most People Are Unaware Or Unashamed Of Being Envious.

All Time Is Eternal, Moving Inexorably Toward An End Which We Believe Is A Result Of Our Actions, But Over Which Our Control Is Mere Illusion.

Before A Cat Will Condescend To Treat You As A Trusted Friend, Some Little Token Of Esteem Is Needed, Like A Dish Of Cream; And You Might Now And Then Supply Some Caviare, Or Strassburg Pie, Some Potted Grouse, Or Salmon Paste — He's Sure To Have His Personal Taste. (i Know A Cat, Who Makes A Habit Of Eating Nothing Else But Rabbit, And When He's Finished, Licks His Paws So's Not To Waste The Onion Sauce.) A Cat's Entitled To Expect These Evidences Of Respect. And So In Time You Reach Your Aim, And Finally Call Him By His Name.

Between The Idea And The Reality Between The Motion And The Act Falls The Shadow For Thine Is The Kingdom Between The Conception And The Creation Between The Emotion And The Response Falls The Shadow Life Is Very Long Between The Desire And The Spasm Between The Potency And The Existence Between The Essence And The Descent Falls The Shadow For Thine Is The Kingdom For Thine Is Life Is For Thine Is The 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.

Yeats Was The Greatest Poet Of Our Times . . . Certainly The Greatest In This Language, And So Far As I Am Able To Judge, In Any Language.

A Cold Coming We Had Of It, Just The Worst Time Of The Year For A Journey, And Such A Long Journey: The Ways Deep And The Weather Sharp, The Very Dead Of Winter.

Think Neither Fear Nor Courage Saves Us. Unnatural Vices Are Fathered By Our Heroism. Virtues Are Forced Upon Us By Our Impudent Crimes. These Tears Are Shaken From The Wrath-bearing Tree.

The Historical Sense Involves A Perception, Not Only Of The Pastness Of The Past, But Of Its Presence

Humility Is The Most Difficult Of All Virtues To Achieve; Nothing Dies Harder Than The Desire To Think Well Of Self.

Sensibility Alters From Generation To Generation In Everybody, Whether We Will Or No; But Expression Is Only Altered By A Man Of Genius.

The Only Hope, Or Else Despair Lies In The Choice Of Pyre Or Pyre - To Be Redeemed From Fire By Fire.

We Read Many Books, Because We Cannot Know Enough People.

Light Light The Visible Reminder Of Invisible Light.

I Am Glad You Have A Cat, But I Do Not Believe It Is So Remarkable A Cat As My Cat.

No Place Of Grace For Those Who Avoid The Face. No Time To Rejoice For Those Who Walk Among Noise And Deny The Voice.

Poetry Should Help, Not Only To Refine The Language Of The Time, But To Prevent It From Changing Too Rapidly.

He Had A Mind So Fine That No Idea Could Violate It

I Should Have Been A Pair Of Ragged Claws/ Scuttling Across The Floors Of Silent Seas.

Every Phrase And Every Sentence Is An End And A Beginning, Every Poem An Epitaph.

The Church Must Be Forever Building, For It Is Forever Decaying Within And Attacked From Without.

O Father, Father Gone From Us, Lost To Us, The Church Lies Bereft, Alone, Desecrated, Desolated. And The Heathen Shall Build On The Ruins Their World Without God. I See It. I See It.

The Role Of Art Is Not To Express The Personality But To Overcome It.

These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruins

Every Moment Is A New And Shocking Transvaluation Of All We Have Ever Been.

Bad Poets Imitate, Good Poets Steal.

Whatever You Do, Don't Whimper, But Take The Consequences.

And They Write Innumerable Books; Being Too Vain And Distracted For Silence: Seeking Every One After His Own Elevation, And Dodging His Emptiness.

The Civil War Is Not Ended: I Question Whether Any Serious Civil War Ever Does End.

April Is The Cruelest Month, Breeding Lilacs Out Of The Dead Land, Mixing Memory And Desire, Stirring Dull Roots With Spring Rain.

In The Mountains, There You Feel Free.

I Am Tired With My Own Life And The Lives Of Those After Me, I Am Dying In My Own Death And The Deaths Of Those After Me.

I Have Measured Out My Life With Coffee Spoons.

Quick Now, Here, Now, Always- A Condition Of Complete Simplicity (costing Not Less Than Everything) And All Shall Be Well And All Manner Of Thing Shall Be Well When The Tongues Of Flame Are In-folded Into The Crowned Knot Of Fire And The Fire And The Rose Are One.

I Take As Metaphysical Poetry That In Which What Is Ordinarily Apprehensible Only By Thought Is Brought Within The Grasp Of Feeling, Or That In Which What Is Ordinarily Only Felt Is Transformed Into Thought Without Ceasing To Be Feeling.

We Are The Hollow Men We Are The Stuffed Men Leaning Together...

It Is Self-evident That St. Louis Affected Me More Deeply Than Any Other Environment Has Ever Done. I Feel That There Is Something In Having Passed One's Childhood Beside The Big River, Which Is Incommunicable To Those People Who Have Not. I Consider Myself Fortunate To Have Been Born Here, Rather Than In Boston, Or New York, Or London.

Destiny ... A Word Which Means More Than We Can Find Any Definitions For. It Is A Word Which Can Have No Meaning In A Mechanical Universe: If That Which Is Wound Up Must Run Down, What Destiny Is There In That? Destiny Is Not Necessitarianism, And It Is Not Caprice: It Is Something Essentially Meaningful. Each Man Has His Destiny, Though Some Men Are Undoubtedly "men Of Destiny" In A Sense In Which Most Men Are Not.

The Hippopotamus's Day Is Passed In Sleep; At Night He Hunts; God Works In A Mysterious Way- The Church Can Sleep And Feed At Once.

So The Darkness Shall Be The Light, And The Stillness The Dancing.

And Indeed There Will Be Time To Wonder, 'do I Dare?', And 'do I Dare?

The Tendency Of Liberals Is To Create Bodies Of Men And Women-of All Classes-detached From Tradition, Alienated From Religion, And Susceptible To Mass Suggestion-mob Rule. And A Mob Will Be No Less A Mob If It Is Well Fed, Well Clothed, Well Housed, And Well Disciplined.

Anecdote: It Is By No Means Self-evident That Human Beings Are Most Real When Most Violently Excited; Violent Physical Passions Do Not In Themselves Differentiate Men From Each Other, But Rather Tend To Reduce Them To The Same State.

As A Rule, With Me An Unfinished [idea] Is A Thing That Might As Well Be Rubbed Out. It's Better, If There's Something Good In It That I Might Make Use Of Elsewhere, To Leave It At The Back Of My Mind Than On Paper In A Drawer. If I Leave It In A Drawer It Remains The Same Thing But If It's In The Memory It Becomes Transformed Into Something Else.

Everyone's Alone - Or So It Seems To Me. They Make Noises, And Think They Are Talking To Each Other; They Make Faces, And Think They Understand Each Other. And I'm Sure They Don't. Is That A Delusion?

The Yellow Fog That Rubs Its Back Upon The Window-panes The Yellow Smoke That Rubs Its Muzzle On The Window-panes Licked Its Tongue Into The Corners Of The Evening Lingered Upon The Pools That Stand In Drains Let Fall Upon Its Back The Soot That Falls From Chimneys Slipped By The Terrace, Made A Sudden Leap And Seeing That It Was A Soft October Night Curled Once About The House, And Fell Asleep

When The Gods Know That A God Hath Fallen, With This Kindly Feeling They Do Encourage Him-- Be Thou A God Again And Again.

Art Never Improves, But... The Material Of Art Is Never Quite The Same.

It Is Not Enough To Understand What We Ought To Be, Unless We Know What We Are; And We Do Not Understand What We Are, Unless We Know What We Ought To Be.

If You Will Not Have God (and He Is A Jealous God), You Should Pay Your Respects To Hitler Or Stalin.

Business Today Consists In Persuading Crowds.

A Good Half Of The Effort Of Understanding What The Indian Philosophers Were After - And Their Subtleties Make Most Of The Great European Philosophers Look Like Schoolboys.

Some Editors Are Failed Writers, But So Are Most Writers.

Words Move, Music Moves Only In Time; But That Which Is Only Living Can Only Die. Words, After Speech, Reach Into The Silence. Only By The Form, The Pattern, Can Words Or Music Reach The Stillness.

A National Culture, If It Is To Flourish, Should Be A Constellation Of Cultures, The Constitutes Of Which, Benefiting Each Other, Benefit The Whole.

What Have We Given? My Friend, Blood Shaking My Heart The Awful Daring Of A Moment's Surrender Which An Age Of Prudence Can Never Retract By This, And This Only, We Have Existed.

Poets In Our Civilization, As It Exists At Present, Must Be Difficult...the Poet Must Become More And More Comprehensive, More Allusive, More Indirect, In Order To Force, To Dislocate If Necessary, Language Into Its Meaning.

Immature Poets Imitate; Mature Poets Steal; Bad Poets Deface What They Take, And Good Poets Make It Into Something Better, Or At Least Something Different.

Stealing Things

No Poet, No Artist Of Any Art, Has His Complete Meaning Alone. His Significance, His Appreciation Is The Appreciation Of His Relation To The Dead Poets And Artists. You Cannot Value Him Alone; You Must Set Him, For Contrast And Comparison, Among The Dead.

Why Should Men Love The Church? Why Should They Love Her Laws? She Tells Them Of Life And Death, And Of All That They Would Forget.

Let's Not Be Narrow, Nasty, And Negative.

The Communication Of The Dead Is Tongued With Fire Beyond The Language Of The Living.

No Generation Is Interested In Art In Quite The Same Way As Any Other; Each Generation, Like Each Individual, Brings To The Contemplation Of Art Its Own Categories Of Appreciation, Makes Its Own Demands Upon Art, And Has Its Own Uses For Art.

The Fool,fixed In His Folly,may Think He Can Turn The Wheel On Which He Turns.

In The End Is My Beginning.

That Meddling In Other People's Affairs...formerly Conducted By The Most Discreet Intrigue Is Now Openly Advocated Under The Name Of Intervention.

Each Way Means Loneliness -- And Communion.

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 Gliding Wrapt In A Brown Mantle, Hooded I Do Not Know Whether A Man Or A Woman -but Who Is That On The Other Side Of You?

We Fight For Lost Causes Because We Know That Our Defeat And Dismay May Be The Preface To Our Successors' Victory, Though That Victory Itself Will Be Temporary; We Fight Rather To Keep Something Alive Than In The Expectation That Anything Will Triumph.

The Good Poet Welds His Theft Into A Whole Of Feeling Which Is Unique, Utterly Different From That From Which It Was Torn; The Bad Poet Throws It Into Something Which Has No Cohesion.

Simple And Faithless As A Smile And Shake Of The Hand.

At The Still Point, There The Dance Is.

Whatever You Think, Be Sure It Is What You Think; Whatever You Want, Be Sure That Is What You Want; Whatever You Feel, Be Sure That Is What You Feel.

You Have To Risk Going Too Far To Discover Just How Far You Can Really Go.

We Die To Each Other Daily. What We Know Of Other People Is Only Our Memory Of The Moments During Which We Knew Them. And They Have Changed Since Then. To Pretend That They And We Are The Same Is A Useful And Convenient Social Convention Which Must Sometimes Be Broken. We Must Also Remember That At Every Meeting We Are Meeting A Stranger.

The Single Rose Is Now The Garden Where All Loves End

Now That Lilacs Are In Bloom She Has A Bowl Of Lilacs In Her Room And Twists One In Her Fingers While She Talks. "ah, My Friend, You Do Not Know, You Do Not Know What Life Is, You Who Hold It In Your Hands"; (slowly Twisting The Lilac Stalks) "you Let It Flow From You, You Let It Flow, And Youth Is Cruel, And Has No Remorse And Smiles At Situations Which It Cannot See." I Smile, Of Course, And Go On Drinking Tea.

In The Room The Women Come And Go Talking Of Michelangelo.

Those Who Say They Give The Public What It Wants Begin By Underestimating Public Taste And End By Debauching It.

Accident Is Design / And Design Is Accident / In A Cloud Of Unknowing.

A Wrong Attitude Towards Nature Implies, Somewhere, A Wrong Attitude Towards God, And That The Consequence Is An Inevitable Doom. For A Long Enough Time We Have Believed In Nothing But The Values Arising In A Mechanized, Commercialized, Urbanized Way Of Life: It Would Be As Well For Us To Face The Permanent Conditions Upon Which God Allows Us To Live Upon This Planet.

There's No Vocabulary For Love Within A Family, Love That's Lived In But Not Looked At, Love Within The Light Of Which All Else Is Seen, The Love Within Which All Other Love Finds Speech. This Love Is Silent.

We Must Learn To Suffer More.

A Philosophy Can And Must Be Worked Out With The Greatest Rigour And Discipline In The Details, But Can Ultimately Be Founded On Nothing But Faith: And This Is The Reason, I Suspect, Why The Novelties In Philosophy Are Only In Elaboration, And Never In Fundamentals.

The Name That No Human Research Can Discover-- But The Cat Himself Knows, And Will Never Confess. When You Notice A Cat In Profound Meditation, The Reason, I Tell You, Is Always The Same: His Mind Is Engaged In A Rapt Contemplation Of The Thought, Of The Thought, Of The Thought Of His Name: His Ineffable Effable Effanineffable Deep And Inscrutable Singular Name.

Finding A Way To Live The Simple Life Is One Of Life's Supreme Complications.

I Am Aware Of The Damp Souls Of Housemaids Sprouting Despondently At Area Gates.

He Is Haunted By A Demon, A Demon Against Which He Feels Powerless, Because In Its First Manifestation It Has No Face, No Name, Nothing; And The Words, The Poem He Makes, Are A Kind Of Exorcism Of This Demon.

Knowledge Is Invariably A Matter Of Degree: You Cannot Put Your Finger Upon Even The Simplest Datum And Say This We Know.

Death Has A Hundred Hands And Walks By A Thousand Ways.

Survival Is Your Strength Not Your Shame.

As Things Are, And As Fundamentally They Must Always Be, Poetry Is Not A Career, But A Mug's Game. No Honest Poet Can Ever Feel Quite Sure Of The Permanent Value Of What He Has Written: He May Have Wasted His Time And Messed Up His Life For Nothing.

It Is Impossible To Design A System So Perfect That No One Needs To Be Good.

When The Whole World Is Running Headlong Towards The Precipice, One Who Walks In The Opposite Direction Is Looked At As Being Crazy.

No Artist Produces Great Art By A Deliberate Attempt To Express His Own Personality.

The Pekes And The Pollicles, Everyone Knows, Are Proud And Implacable, Passionate Foes; It Is Always The Same, Wherever One Goes. And The Pugs And The Poms, Although Most People Say That They Do Not Like Fighting, Will Often Display Every Symptom Of Wanting To Join In The Fray. And They Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Until You Can Hear Them All Over The Park.

If One Has To Earn A Living, Therefore, The Safest Occupation Is That Most Remote From The Arts.

The Purpose Of Literature Is To Turn Blood Into Ink.

So The Lover Must Struggle For Words.

The End Is Where We Start From.

There Is No Such Thing As A Lost Cause, Because There Is No Such Thing As A Gained Cause

There Is No Absolute Point Of View From Which Real And Ideal Can Be Finally Separated And Labelled.

In Order To Possess What You Do Not Possess, You Must Go By The Way Of Dispossession.

The Naming Of Cats Is A Difficult Matter. It Isn't Just One Of Your Holiday Games. You May Think At First I'm Mad As A Hatter. When I Tell You A Cat Must Have Three Different Names.

As She Laughed I Was Aware Of Becoming Involved In Her Laughter And Being Part Of It, Until Her Teeth Were Only Accidental Stars With A Talent For Squad-drill.

Sometimes Things Become Possible If We Want Them Bad Enough.

Culture Is The One Thing That We Cannot Deliberately Aim At. It Is The Product Of A Variety Of More Or Less Harmonious Activities, Each Pursued For Its Own Sake.

Birth, And Copulation, And Death; That's All The Facts When You Come To Brass Tacks.

To Each Individual The World Will Take On A Different Connotation Of Meaning-the Important Lies In The Desire To Search For An Answer.

But It Seems That Something Has Happened That Has Never Happened Before: Though We Know Not Just When, Or Why, Or How, Or Where.

I Must Tell You That I Should Really Like To Think There's Something Wrong With Me- Because, If There Isn't, Then There's Something Wrong With The World Itself-and That's Much More Frightening! That Would Be Terrible. So I'd Rather Believe There Is Something Wrong With Me, That Could Be Put Right.

The Winter Evening Settles Down With Smell Of Steaks In Passageways.

From A Purely External Point Of View There Is No Will; And To Find Will In Any Phenomenon Requires A Certain Empathy; We Observe Aman's Actions And Place Ourselves Partly But Not Wholly In His Position; Or We Act, And Place Ourselves Partly In The Position Of An Outsider.

Time Present And Time Past Are Both Perhaps Present In Time Future, And Time Future Contained In Time Past. If All Time Is Eternally Present All Time Is Unredeemable.

It Is Impossible To Say Just What I Mean!

If You Do Not Push The Boundaries, You Will Never Know Where They Are.

Because These Wings Are No Longer Wings To Fly But Merely Vans To Beat The Air The Air Which Is Now Thoroughly Small And Dry Smaller And Dryer Than The Will Teach Us To Care And Not To Care Teach Us To Sit Still

The Overwhelming Pressure Of Mediocrity, Sluggish And Indomitable As A Glacier, Will Mitigate The Most Violent, And Depress The Most Exalted Revolution.

The Progress Of An Artist Is A Continual Self-sacrifice, A Continual Extinction Of Personality.

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