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.
quote by T.S. Eliot
Added by Lucian Velea
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If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby ""it.""
quote by T.S. Eliot
Added by Lucian Velea
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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.
quote by T.S. Eliot
Added by Lucian Velea
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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.
quote by T.S. Eliot
Added by Lucian Velea
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Any pioneer of a revolution in poetry - and Mr. Pound is more responsible for the XXth Century revolution in poetry than is any other individual - is sure to attack some venerated names.
T.S. Eliot in Introduction to «Literary Essays of Ezra Pound» (1954)
Added by Dan Costinaş
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So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good; so far as we do evil or good, we are human; and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing; at least we exist.
quote by T.S. Eliot
Added by Lucian Velea
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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.
quote by T.S. Eliot
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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.
quote by T.S. Eliot
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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.
quote by T.S. Eliot
Added by Lucian Velea
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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.
quote by T.S. Eliot
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