“War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.”
“The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”
“What we know of other people's only our memory of the moments during which we knew them.”
“The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”
“For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice.”
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.”
“An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.”
“If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, you must accept the terms it offers you.”
“Time past and time future what might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.”
“When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.”
“It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry --That is a life.”
“Footfalls echo in the memory down the passage which we did not take towards the door we never opened into the rose-garden.”
“April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”
“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.”
“It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.”
“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.”
“Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.”
“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.”
“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.”
“For every life and every act consequence of good and evil can be shown and as in time results of many deeds are blended so good and evil in the end become confounded.”
“And what the dead had no speech for, when living, they can tell you, being dead: the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 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.”