In the words of T. S. Eliot:
Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.
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 soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself.
People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.
It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.
These are only hints and guesses, Hints followed by guesses; and the rest Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
Our high respect for a well-read person is praise enough for literature.
To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.
I learn a great deal by merely observing you, and letting you talk as long as you please, and taking note of what you do not say.
Finding a way to live the simple life is one of life's supreme complications.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
When the whole world is running headlong towards the precipice, one who walks in the opposite direction is looked at as being crazy.
Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self.
Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
If we really want to pray we must first learn to listen, for in the silence of the heart God speaks.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.
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?
Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.
Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, Falls the shadow.
Success is relative. It is what we make of the mess we have made of things.
We shall not cease from exploring, And the end of our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
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.
Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment.
You have to risk going too far to discover just how far you can really go.
Poetry is not an assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.
The old should be explorers, be curious, risk transgression, explore oldness itself.
Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.
Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.
For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice.
Tradition: how the vitality of the past enriches the life of the present.
Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it.
In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession.
There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
To each individual the world will take on a different connotation of meaning-the important lies in the desire to search for an answer.
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.
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.
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.
Artistic inevitability lies in the complete adequacy of the external to the emotion.
All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment.
The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions.
I am moved by fancies that are curled, around these images and cling, the notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.
Here between the hither and the farther shore While time is withdrawn, consider the future And the past with an equal mind.
We can say of Shakespeare, that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.
This is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word.
And the end and the beginning were always there Before the beginning and after the end.
Because I know that time is always time And place is always and only place.
We see the light but see not whence it comes. O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!
The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without.
The lot of man is ceaseless labor, Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder.
Today, you're halfway to 100! Here's to optimism, whether it is realistic or not. Happy 50th birthday!
Each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.
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