Background Image

...

Honest Criticism And Sensitive Appreciation Are Directed Not Upon The Poet But Upon The Poetry.

-T. S. Eliot

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Honest Criticism And Sensitive

T. S. Eliot

...

Honest Criticism And Sensitive Appreciation Are Directed Not Upon The Poet But Upon The Poetry.

Views: 10

Topic

More From T. S. Eliot

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.

[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.

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.

The Dove Descending Breaks The Air With Flame Of Incandescent Terror Of Which The Tongues Declare The One Discharge From Sin And Error. The Only Hope, Or Else Despair Lies In The Choice Of Pyre Or Pyre- To Be Redeemed From Fire By Fire. Who Then Devised The Torment? Love. Love Is The Unfamiliar Name Behind The Hands That Wove The Intolerable Shirt Of Flame Which Human Power Cannot Remove. We Only Live, Only Suspire Consumed By Either Fire Or Fire.

With A Poem You Can Say 'i Got My Feeling Into Words For Myself. I Now Have The Equivalent In Words For That Much Of What I Have Felt.'

Weave, Weave The Sunlight In Your Hair-

With Out Some Kind Of God, Man Is Not Very Intresting

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

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

Cold Mountain Buddhas Han Shan Wait Without Thought, For You Are Not Ready For Thought: So The Darkness Shall Be The Light, And The Stillness Be Dancing. Whisper Of Running Streams, And Winter Lightning. The Wild Thyme Unseen And The Wild Strawberry, The Laughter In The Garden, Echoed Ecstasy Not Lost, But Requiring, Pointing To The Agony Of Death And Birth.

The Journey, Not The Destination Matters.

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

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.

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.

Time For You And Time For Me, And Time Yet For A Hundred Indecisions, And For A Hundred Visions And Revisions, Before The Taking Of A Toast And Tea.

To Make An End Is To Make A Beginning.

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.

Lady Of Silences Calm And Distressed Torn And Most Whole Rose Of Memory Rose Of Forgetfulness Exhausted And Life-giving Worried Reposeful The Single Rose Is Now The Garden Where All Loves End Terminate Torment Of Love Unsatisfied The Greater Torment Of Love Satisfied End Of The Endless Journey To No End Conclusion Of All That Is Inconclusible Speech Without Word And Word Of No Speech Grace To The Mother For The Garden Where All Love Ends.

People Are Only Influenced In The Direction In Which They Want To Go, And Influence Consists Largely In Making Them Conscious Of Their Wishes To Proceed In That Direction.

There Are Flood And Drought Over The Eyes And In The Mouth, Dead Water And Dead Sand Contending For The Upper Hand. The Parched Eviscerate Soil Gapes At The Vanity Of Toil, Laughs Without Mirth. This Is The Death Of The Earth.

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.

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

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.

I Shall Not Want Honor In Heaven For I Shall Meet Sir Philip Sidney And Have Talk With Coriolanus And Other Heroes Of That Kidney.

Time Present And Time Past / Are Both Perhaps Present In Time Future.

The Last Temptation Is The Greatest Treason: To Do The Right Deed For The Wrong Reason.

As We Grow Older, The World Becomes Stranger, The Pattern More Complicated Of Dead And Living.

Light Light The Visible Reminder Of Invisible Light.

There Is Not A More Repulsive Spectacle Than On Old Man Who Will Not Forsake The World, Which Has Already Forsaken Him.

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

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

In Order To Arrive At What You Are Not, You Must Go Through The Way In Which You Are Not.

When A Cat Adopts You, And I Am Not Superstitious At All I Don't Mean Only Black Cats There Is Nothing To Be Done About It Except To Put Up With It And Wait Until The Wind Changes.

When A Great Poet Has Lived, Certain Things Have Been Done Once For All, And Cannot Be Achieved Again.

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

A Play Should Give You Something To Think About. When I See A Play And Understand It The First Time, Then I Know It Can't Be Much Good.

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.

Playwriting Gets Into Your Blood And You Can't Stop It. At Least Not Until The Producers Or The Public Tell You To.

It Is Impossible To Say Just What I Mean!

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.

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

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.

Thus With Most Careful Devotion Thus With Precise Attention To Detail, Interfering Preparation Of That Which Is Already Prepared Men Lighten The Knot Of Confusion Into Perfect Misunderstanding, Reflecting A Pocket-torch Of Observation.

I Grow Old … I Grow Old … I Shall Wear The Bottoms Of My Trousers Rolled.

I Love Reading Another Reader’s List Of Favorites. Even When I Find I Do Not Share Their Tastes Or Predilections, I Am Provoked To Compare, Contrast, And Contradict. It Is A Most Healthy Exercise, And One Altogether Fruitful.

There Is No Feeling, Except The Extremes Of Fear And Grief, That Does Not Find Relief In Music.

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.

It Is Not Necessarily Those Lands Which Are The Most Fertile Or Most Favored In Climate That Seem To Me The Happiest, But Those In Which A Long Struggle Of Adaptation Between Man And His Environment Has Brought Out The Best Qualities Of Both.

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

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

The Usual Dog About The Town Is Much Inclined To Play The Clown.

I Am An Anglo-catholic In Religion, A Classicist In Literature And A Royalist In Politics.

It's Strange That Words Are So Inadequate. Yet, Like The Asthmatic Struggling For Breath, So The Lover Must Struggle For Words.

In Life There Is Not Time To Grieve Long.

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?

All Dash To And Fro In Motor Cars. Familiar With The Roads And Settled Nowhere.

Tennyson And Browning Are Poets, And They Think; But They Do Not Feel Their Thought As Immediately As The Odour Of A Rose. A Thought To Donne Was An Experience; It Modified His Sensibility.

In My Beginning Is My End. In Succession Houses Rise And Fall, Crumble, Are Extended, Are Removed, Destroyed, Restored, Or In Their Place Is An Open Field, Or A Factory, Or A By-pass. Old Stone To New Building, Old Timber To New Fires, Old Fires To Ashes, And Ashes To The Earth Which Is Already Flesh, Fur And Faeces, Bone Of Man And Beast, Cornstalk And Leaf.

And Through The Spaces Of The Dark Midnight Shakes The Memory As A Madman Shakes A Dead Geranium.

The Lot Of Man Is Ceaseless Labor, Or Ceaseless Idleness, Which Is Still Harder.

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

Today, You're Halfway To 100! Here's To Optimism, Whether It Is Realistic Or Not. Happy 50th Birthday!

The Difference Between Being An Elder Statesman And Posing Successfully As An Elder Statesman Is Practically Negligible.

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.

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.

In A Mind Charged With An Eager Purpose And An Unfinished Vindictiveness, There Is No Room For New Feelings.

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

The Winter Evening Settles Down With Smell Of Steaks In Passageways. Six O'clock. The Burnt-out Ends Of Smoky Days. And Now A Gusty Shower Wraps The Grimy Scraps Of Withered Leaves About Your Feet And Newspapers From Vacant Lots; The Showers Beat On Broken Blinds And Chimney-pots, And At The Corner Of The Street A Lonely Cab-horse Steams And Stamps. And Then The Lighting Of The Lamps.

Between The Desire And The Spasm, Between The Potency And The Existence, Between The Essence And The Descent, Falls The Shadow.

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

A Crowd Flowed Over London Bridge, So Many, I Had Not Thought Death Had Undone So Many.

The Past And Future / Are Conquered, And Reconciled.

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

Here I Am, An Old Man In A Dry Month, Being Read To By A Boy, Waiting For Rain.

Paint Me The Bold Anfractuous Rocks Faced By The Snarled And Yelping Seas.

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

The Darkness Declares The Glory Of Light.

Only Through Time Time Is Conquered

Composing On The Typewriter, I Find That I Am Sloughing Off All My Long Sentences Which I Used To Dote Upon. Short, Staccato, Like Modern French Prose. The Typewriter Makes For Lucidity, But I Am Not Sure That It Encourages Subtlety.

We Know Too Much, And Are Convinced Of Too Little. Our Literature Is A Substitute For Religion, And So Is Our Religion.

I Suspect That In Our Loathing Of Totalitarianism, There Is Infused A Good Deal Of Admiration For Its Efficiency.

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

A People Without History Is Not Redeemed From Time, For History Is A Pattern Of Timeless Moments.

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

You Have Learned Enough To See That Cats Are Much Like You And Me.

Humor Is Also A Way Of Saying Something Serious.

Bad Poets Imitate, Good Poets Steal.

People To Whom Nothing Has Ever Happened Cannot Understand The Unimportance Of Events.

Success Is Relative. It Is What We Make Of The Mess We Have Made Of Things.

All Our Knowledge Brings Us Nearer To Our Ignorance.

Again I Must Remind You That A Dog's A Dog-a Cat's A Cat.

I Am Moved By Fancies That Are Curled, Around These Images And Cling, The Notion Of Some Infinitely Gentle, Infinitely Suffering Thing.

To Justify Christian Morality Because It Provides A Foundation Of Morality, Instead Of Showing The Necessity Of Christian Morality From The Truth Of Christianity, Is A Very Dangerous Inversion.

But It Seems That Something Has Happened That Has Never Happened Before; Though We Know Not Just When, Or Why, Or How, Or Where. Men Have Left God Not For Gods, They Say, But For No Gods; And This Has Never Happened Before. That Men Both Deny Gods And Worship Gods, Professing First Reason, And The Money, And Power, And What They Call Life, Or Race, Or Dialect.the Church Disowned, The Tower Overthrown, The Bells Upturned, What Have We To Do But Stand With Empty Hands And Palms Upturned In An Age Which Advances Progressively Backwards?

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

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

The Ordinary Man's Experience Is Chaotic, Irregular, Fragmentary. [he] 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

Falling In Love

The Hint Half Guessed, The Gift Half Understood, Is Incarnation.

They Don't Understand What It Is To Be Awake, / To Be Living On Several Planes At Once / Though One Cannot Speak With Several Voices At Once.

I Have A Gumbie Cat In Mind, Her Name Is Jennyanydots;her Coat Is One Of The Tabby Kind,with Tiger Stripes And Lepard Spots.

Trying To Use Words, And Every Attempt Is A Wholly New Start, And A Different Kind Of Failure Because One Has Only Learnt To Get The Better Of Words For The Thing One No Longer Has To Say, Or The Way In Which One Is No Longer Disposed To Say It. And So Each Venture Is A New Beginning, A Raid On The Inarticulate With Shabby Equipment Always Deteriorating In The General Mess Of Imprecision Of Feeling.

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

An Editor Should Tell The Author His Writing Is Better Than It Is. Not A Lot Better, A Little Better.

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.

I Said To My Soul, Be Still, And Let The Dark Come Upon You Which Shall Be The Darkness Of God. . . . So The Darkness Shall Be The Light, And The Stillness The Dancing.

It Is Only In The World Of Objects That We Have Time And Space And Selves.

Most Contemporary Novels Are Not Really "written." They Obtain What Reality They Have Largely From An Accurate Rendering Of The Noises That Human Beings Currently Make In Their Daily Simple Needs Of Communication; And What Part Of A Novel Is Not Composed Of These Noises Consists Of A Prose Which Is No More Alive Than That Of A Competent Newspaper Writer Or Government Official. A Prose That Is Altogether Alive Demands Something Of The Reader That The Ordinary Novel-reader Is Not Prepared To Give.

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

And All Shall Be Well And/ All Manner Of Thing Shall Be Well/ By The Purification Of The Motive/ In The Ground Of Our Beseeching

For You Know Only A Heap Of Broken Images

The Nightingales Are Singing Near The Convent Of The Sacred Heart, And Sang Within The Bloody Wood When Agamemnon Cried Aloud, And Let Their Liquid Siftings Fall To Stain The Stiff Dishonored Shroud.

Poetry Is A Mug's Game.

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

After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? Think Now History Has Many Cunning Passages, Contrived Corridors And Issues, Deceives With Whispering Ambitions Guides Us By Vanities.

Good Poets Borrow, Great Poets Steal

For Love Would Be Love Of The Wrong Thing; There Is Yet Faith, But The Faith And The Love And The Hope Are All In The Waiting.

You Can Evade Life, But You Can Not Evade Death.

All Time Is Unreedemable.

Thinking Of The Key, Each Confirms A Prison.

Can We Only Love Something Created In Our Own Imaginations?

Our High Respect For A Well Read Person Is Praise Enough For Literature.

War Among Men Defiles This World.

Sometimes Things Become Possible If We Want Them Bad Enough.

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.

Time Past And Time Future What Might Have Been And What Has Been Point To One End, Which Is Always Present.

The End Is Where We Start From.

…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.

If We Are Moved By A Poem, It Has Meant Something, Perhaps Something Important, To Us; If We Are Not Moved, Then It Is, As Poetry, Meaningless.

At The Violet Hour, When The Eyes And Back Turn Upward From The Desk, When The Human Engine Waits Like A Taxi Throbbing Waiting I Tiresias, Though Blind, Throbbing Between Two Lives.

Every Experience Is A Paradox In That It Means To Be Absolute, And Yet Is Relative; In That It Somehow Always Goes Beyond Itself And Yet Never Escapes Itself.

Immature Poets Imitate; Mature Poets Steal.

No Scheme For A Change Of Society Can Be Made To Appear Immediately Palatable, Except By Falsehood, Until Society Has Become So Desperate That It Will Accept Any Change.

We Are Not Here To Triumph By Fighting, By Strata Gem, Or By Resistance, Not To Fight With Beasts As Men. We Have Fought The Beast And Have Conquered. We Have Only To Conquer Now, By Suffering. This Is The Easier Victory.

Poetry Is Not A Turning Loose Of Emotion, But An Escape From Emotion.

Individual Talent

I Had Seen Birth And Death But Had Thought They Were Different.

Hurry Up, Please, Its Time.

Most Of The Evil In This World Is Done By People With Good Intentions.

The Hint Half Guessed, The Gift Half Understood, Is Incarnation. Here The Impossible Union Of Spheres Of Existence Is Actual. Here The Past And Future Are Conquered And Reconciled.

Destiny Waits In The Hand Of God, Not In The Hands Of Statesmen.

I Do Not Know Much About Gods; But I Think That The River Is A Strong Brown God-sullen, Untamed And Intractable.

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.

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.

If You Start With A Bang, You Won't End With A Whimper.

Winter Kept Us Warm, Covering Earth In Forgetful Snow

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

Desire Itself Is Movement Not In Itself Desirable; Love Is Itself Unmoving, Only The Cause And End Of Movement, Timeless, And Undesiring Except In The Aspect Of Time Caught In The Form Of Limitation Between Un-being And Being.

We Have Lingered In The Chambers Of The Sea By Sea-girls Wreathed With Seaweed Red And Brown Till Human Voices Wake Us... And We Drown.

If The Lost Word Is Lost, If The Spent Word Is Spent If The Unheard, Unspoken Word Is Unspoken, Unheard; Still Is The Spoken Word, The Word Unheard, The Word Without A Word, The Word Within The World And For The World; And The Light Shone In The Darkness And Against The Word The Unstilled World Still Whirled About The Center Of The Silent Word. Oh My People, What Have I Done Unto Thee. Where Shall The Word Be Found, Where Shall The Word Resound? Not Here, There Is Not Enough Silence

I've Been Born, And Once Is Enough.

This Is The Way The World Ends, Not With A Bang, But A Whimper.

Life Is Long Between The Desire And The Spasm.

There Is, It Seems To Us, At Best, Only A Limited Value In The Knowledge Derived From Experience.

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.

There Are Three Conditions Which Often Look Alike Yet Differ Completely, Flourish In The Same Hedgerow: Attachment To Self And To Things And To Persons, Detachment From Self And From Things And From Persons; And, Growing Between Them, Indifference, ... .

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

We Do Not Quite Say That The New Is More Valuable Because It Fits In; But Its Fitting In Is A Test Of Its Value - A Test, It Is True, Which Can Only Be Slowly And Cautiously Applied, For We Are None Of Us Infallible Judges Of Conformity.

The Old Should Be Explorers, Be Curious, Risk Transgression, Explore Oldness Itself.

Think Not Forever Of Yourselves, O Chiefs, Nor Of Your Own Generation. Think Of Continuing Generations Of Our Families, Think Of Our Grandchildren And Of Those Yet Unborn, Whose Faces Are Coming From Beneath The Ground.

Native American

Ambition Fortifies The Will Of Man To Become Ruler Over Other Men: It Operates With Deception, Cajolery, And Violence, It Is The Action Of Impurity Upon Impurity.

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.

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

Let Us Go Then, You And I, When The Evening Is Spread Out Against The Sky

But At My Back From Time To Time I Hear The Sound Of Horns And Motors, Which Shall Bring Sweeney To Mrs. Porter In The Spring. O The Moon Shone Bright On Mrs. Porter And On Her Daughter They Wash Their Feet In Soda Water.

Where Is The Life We Lost In Living?

My Mind May Be American But My Heart Is British.

I Am Glad You Have A Cat, But I Do Not Believe It Is So Remarkable A Cat As My Cat. My Cat Is A Lilliecat Hubvously. What A Lilliecat It Is. There Never Was Such A Lilliecat. Its Name Is Jellyorum And Its One Idea Is To Be Usefull!!

Honest Criticism And Sensitive Appreciation Are Directed Not Upon The Poet But Upon The Poetry.

Philosophy: A Purple Bullfinch In A Lilac Tree.

The Majority Of Mankind Is Lazyminded, Incurious, Absorbed In Vanities, And Tepid In Emotion, And Is Therefore Incapable Of Either Much Doubt Or Much Faith.

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

Every Nation, Every Race, Has Not Only Its Own Creative, But Its Own Critical Turn Of Mind; And Is Even More Oblivious Of The Shortcomings And Limitations Of Its Critical Habits Than Of Those Of Its Creative Genius.

Uncorseted, Her Friendly Bust Gives Promise Of Pneumatic Bliss.

When War Is Not Just It Is Subsequently Justified; So It Becomes Many Things. In Reality, An Unjust War Is Merely Piracy. It Consists Of Piracy, Ego And, More Than Anything, Money. War Is Our Century's Prostitution.

Cling, Swing, Spring, Sing, Swing Up Into The Apple Tree.

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 Das Meer.

The Eastern Light Our Spires Touch At Morning, The Light That Slants Upon Our Western Doors At Evening, The Twilight Over Stagnant Pools At Batflight, Moon Light And Star Light, Owl And Moth Light, Glow-worm Glowlight On A Grassblade. O Light Invisible, We Worship Thee!

For Last Year's Words Belong To Last Year's Language And Next Year's Words Await Another Voice.

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.

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

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

Taking The Question In General, I Should Say, In The Case Of Many Poets, That The Most Important Thing For Them To Do ... Is To Write As Little As Possible

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.

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

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

I Think It Was Rather An Advantage Not Having Any Living Poets In England Or America In Whom One Took Any Particular Interest. I Don't Know What It Would Be Like But I Think It Would Be A Rather Troublesome Distraction To Have Such A Lot Of Dominating Presences, As You Call Them, About. Fortunately We Weren't Bothered By Each Other.

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

Not Fare Well, But Fare Forward

In The Faint Moonlight, The Grass Is Singing

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.

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

Love Is Most Nearly Itself When Here And Now Cease To Matter. Old Men Ought To Be Explorers Here Or There Does Not Matter We Must Be Still And Still Moving Into Another Intensity For A Further Union, A Deeper Communion Through The Dark Cold And The Empty Desolation, The Wave Cry, The Wind Cry, The Vast Waters Of The Petrel And The Porpoise.

Time Past And Time Future Allow But A Little Consciousness. To Be Conscious Is Not To Be In Time.

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

Artistic Inevitability Lies In The Complete Adequacy Of The External To The Emotion.

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

Human Kind Cannot Bear Much Reality.

Here Between The Hither And The Farther Shore While Time Is Withdrawn, Consider The Future And The Past With An Equal Mind.

You Are The Music While The Music Lasts.

In My Beginning Is My End.

Trending Author

Luciano Pavarotti

Category