"We must be steady enough in ourselves, to be open and to let the winds of life blow through us, to be our breath, our inspiration; to breathe with them, mobile and soft in the limberness of our bodies, in our agility, our ability, as it were, to dance, and yet to stand upright."

Rating:

  rate this quote
Topic: none  help us select a topic for this quote

More quotes from: T. S. Eliot

• "A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and ..."
• "An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest ..."
• "And we must think no further of you. "
• "Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity. "
• "Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must ..."
• "April is the cruellest month. "
• "As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, ..."
• "At twenty you have many desires which hide the truth, but beyond forty there are ..."
• "Business today consists in persuading crowds. "
• "Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage which we did not take, towards the ..."
• "For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. "
• "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. "
• "Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who ..."
• "Humankind cannot bear very much reality. "
• "I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics. "
• "I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life ..."
• "I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different. "
• "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. "
• "I must say Bernard Shaw is greatly improved by music. "
• "If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are? "
• "If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred ..."

• "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. "
• "In my beginning is my end. "
• "It ends not with a bang, but a whimper. "
• "It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the ..."
• "It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so ..."
• "Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative. "
• "My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down. "
• "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one ..."
• "Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties ..."
• "Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature. "
• "People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events. "
• "Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the ..."
• "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is ..."
• "Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, ..."
• "Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent ..."
• "So the lover must struggle for words. "
• "Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers. "
• "Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the ..."
• "The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. "
• "The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong ..."

• "The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first. "
• "The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible. "
• "The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything ..."
• "There is no method but to be very intelligent. "
• "There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake ..."
• "This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but a whimper. "
• "This love is silent. "
• "Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in ..."
• "We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute ..."
• "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be ..."
• "What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is ..."
• "Where is all the knowledge we lost with information? "
• "Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have ..."
• "You are the music while the music lasts. "