T. S. Eliot

"Business today consists in persuading crowds."

"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."

"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."

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."

"I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics."

"I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different."

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

"Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm, retreating to the corner of arm and knee, eager to be reassured, taking pleasure in the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree."

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."

"Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature."

"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. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

"Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves."

"Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly."

"So the lover must struggle for words."

"The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all."

"The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living."

"This love is silent."

"We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion."

"You are the music while the music lasts."