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Eliot Quotes

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Eliot Quotes

“Jeremy Bentham startled the world many years ago by stating in effect that if the amount of pleasure obtained from each be equal there is nothing to choose between poetry and push-pin. Since few people now know what push-pin is, I may explain that it is a child's game in which one player tries to push his pin across that of another player, and if he succeeds and then is able by pressing down on the two pins with the ball of his thumb to lift them off the table he wins possession of his opponent's pin. [...] The indignant retort to Bentham's statement was that spiritual pleasures are obviously higher than physical pleasures. But who say so? Those who prefer spiritual pleasures. They are in a miserable minority, as they acknowledge when they declare that the gift of aesthetic appreciation is a very rare one. The vast majority of men are, as we know, both by necessity and choice preoccupied with material considerations. Their pleasures are material. They look askance at those who spent their lives in the pursuit of art. That is why they have attached a depreciatory sense to the word aesthete, which means merely one who has a special appreciation of beauty. How are we going to show that they are wrong? How are we going to show that there is something to choose between poetry and push-pin? I surmise that Bentham chose push-pin for its pleasant alliteration with poetry. Let us speak of lawn tennis. It is a popular game which many of us can play with pleasure. It needs skill and judgement, a good eye and a cool head. If I get the same amount of pleasure out of playing it as you get by looking at Titian's 'Entombment of Christ' in the Louvre, by listening to Beethoven's 'Eroica' or by reading Eliot's 'Ash Wednesday', how are you going to prove that your pleasure is better and more refined than mine? Only, I should say, by manifesting that this gift you have of aesthetic appreciation has a moral effect on your character.”

PleasureEliotUtilitarianismBeethovenGeorge EliotLudwig Van BeethovenTitianJeremy BenthamBenthem
Book:Vagrant Mood
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“Compare King William with the philosopher Haeckel. The king is one of the anointed by the most high, as they claim—one upon whose head has been poured the divine petroleum of authority. Compare this king with Haeckel, who towers an intellectual colossus above the crowned mediocrity. Compare George Eliot with Queen Victoria. The Queen is clothed in garments given her by blind fortune and unreasoning chance, while George Eliot wears robes of glory woven in the loom of her own genius. The world is beginning to pay homage to intellect, to genius, to heart. We have advanced. We have reaped the benefit of every sublime and heroic self-sacrifice, of every divine and brave act; and we should endeavor to hand the torch to the next generation, having added a little to the intensity and glory of the flame.”

HeartChanceSacrificeGeniusGloryBraveryIntellectHeroicSublimeHomageBenefitEliotQueen VictoriaAdvanceColossusGeorge EliotHaeckelErnst HaeckelKing William
Book:The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child
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“Musicians, like golfers, have to put their minds in the right place – trusting, confident, enjoying the pressure, being in present. And so forth. Otherwise, no amount of practice or “Time management” will make them better. The same is true in all professions: if you’re stuck in the Training Mindset, evaluating yourself, or thinking in the past or future, you will not perform up to your potential. You will waste a lot of time, be an inefficient performer, and likely assume you need to manage your time better. In reality you need to manage your thinking better.”

InspirationalTime ManagementEliotOverachievement
Book:Overachievement: The New Science of Working Less to Accomplish More
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“Cal: "I'm really sorry, Professor, but how do you explain these ? Swiss Cake Rolls. That doesn't rhyme; it's not cute; it's not childlike. And this is one of our most-respected snack foods, is it not? How is that, Professor? Hmmm?" Eliot: "Well, isn't it obvious? We trust the Swiss for their ability to engineer things, to build with precision." Cal: "We do?" Eliot: "Do I even have to mention Swiss watches? Swiss Army knives? Swiss cheese? If anyone can build a non-threatening, non-lethal snack cake, it's the Swiss. They're neutral, we can trust them not to attack us with trans-fatty acids and sugar. I think you would feel differently if they were German Cake Rolls. North Korean Cake Rolls. I bet you wouldn't eat them." Cal: "I bet I would.”

HumorEliotCalCalliopeBrad BarkleyHeather HeplerScrambled Eggs At Midnight
Book:Scrambled Eggs at Midnight
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“I momenti di felicità… Ne abbiamo avuto l’esperienza, ma ci è sfuggito il significato, come diceva Eliot. O per meglio dire, non ce ne siamo resi conto, così la vita è passata e alla fine non mi è rimasto che il dolore per la perdita della persona più cara, mia mamma. Carl William Brown”

VitaFelicitàEliotMadreCarl William BrownAforismiPerditaMamma
Book:Aforismi. Volume quarto: Aforismi, massime, pensierini, riflessioni, battute, idee, motti di spirito, invettive, sentenze e paradossi. (I libri del Daimon Club)
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“I do not know of anything in modern poetry as violently hostile to contemporary life as was the poetry of T. S. Eliot, which so perfectly fitted the mood of the young people between the two wars. I also find much more benevolence towards humanity in younger historians than there was in Spengler or in Toynbee. Still, it is not difficult to sense the disgust of the intellectuals at the new prosperous working class, 'with their eyes glued to the television screen,' who have become indifferent to radical ideas.”

PoetryEliotT S EliotOswald SpenglerToynbeeArnold ToynbeeOswald Arnold Gottfried SpenglerSpenglerThomas EliotThomas Stearns Eliot
Book:Inventing the Future
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“Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has begun to change into something else.”

IfsSpiritLiteratureSinPiecesWrittenBecomingAssuranceAccusationPluckClockworkEliotGreat LiteratureForgiveness Of SinsTito
Book:Ideas of Good and Evil
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“Insofar as I think about postmodernism at all, and it doesn't exactly keep me awake at nights, I think of it as something that happens to one, not a style one affects. We're postmoderns because we're not modernists. The modernist writers—Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williams—spoke with a kind of vatic authority: they were really the last of the Romantics, for whom authorship itself was like being a solitary prophet in the wasteland.”

ThinkingKindHappensLastsNightStyleAuthorityAwakeProphetPoundsSpokesSolitaryPostmodernismAuthorshipJoycePostmodernEliotWastelandWoolfAwake At NightYeats
Author:Jonathan Raban
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“Perhaps the central question about [Eliot] Porter's work is about the relationship between science, aesthetics, and environmental politics. His brother, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, wrote in a 1960 review of [Porter's] colour photographs: 'There is no subject and background, every corner is alive,' and this suggests what an ecological aesthetic might look like.”

LooksMightAliveSubjectsBrotherCriticsEnvironmentalPhotographCornersBackgroundsPainterColourReviewsAesthetic1960sAestheticsEcologicalEliot
Author:Rebecca Solnit
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“Pound was silly, bumptious, extravagantly generous, annoying, exhibitionistic; Eliot was sensible, cautious, retiring, soothing, shy. Though Pound wrote some brilliant passages, on the whole he was a failure as a poet (sometimes even in his own estimation); Eliot went from success to success and is still quoted--and misquoted--by thousands of people who have never read him. Both men were expatriates by choice, but Eliot renounced his American citizenship and did his best to become assimilated with his fellow British subjects, while Pound always remained an American in exile.”

PeopleMenStillsSometimesWholeChoicesSubjectsPoetFellowsBritishBrilliantSillyGenerousShyPoundsPassagesRetiringAnnoyingSensibleCitizenshipExileCautiousSoothingEstimationEliotExpatriatesAmerican Citizenship
Author:T.S. Mathews
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“I would not have majored in English and gone on to teach literature had I not been able to construct a counterargument about the truthfulness of fiction; still, as writers turn away from the industrious villages of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, I learn less and less from them that helps me to ponder my life. In time, I found myself agreeing with the course evaluations written by my testier freshman students:'All the literature we read this term was depressing.' How naive. How sane.”

StillsHelpingAbleTurnsCoursesFoundLiteratureTermFictionTeachGoneWrittenStudentsHelp MeVillageSaneDepressingConstructsNaivePonderingTruthfulnessEvaluationHardyIndustriousFreshmanEliotCounterarguments
Book:The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
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“Russell's prose has been compared by T.S. Eliot to that of David Hume's. I would rank it higher, for it had more color, juice, and humor. But to be lucid, exciting and profound in the main body of one's work is a combination of virtues given to few philosophers. Bertrand Russell has achieved immortality by his philosophical writings.”

WritingHas BeensBodyGivenVirtueColorHigherExcitingPhilosophicalProfoundPhilosopherCombinationImmortalityProseJuiceEliotHume
Book:Out of step: an unquiet life in the 20th century
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“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. Anaïs Nin I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved. George Eliot Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star.”

KnowsFirstsLastsDiesStrongForceStarsVoiceNaturalLove IsSilenceKnow HowSunSourceOppositesErrorsMereIllnessBetrayalWoundsBlindnessWearinessWitheringEliotNatural DeathLove Never Dies
Author:e. e. cummings
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“Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”

PeopleThinkingWayYearsBodyVoiceNaturalCommonBehindsWrittenPoetBirthMassForgottenTongueOutcomesSolitaryMasterpieceJaneAustenSavageryTamedEliotForerunnersBronteChaucerMarlowe
Book:A Room of One's Own
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“I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip Larkin, and the British poets who were imported through that important anthology put together by Alvarez - and those would include Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. And I think these poets gave me assurance that there were other ways to write besides the rather involuted style of high modernism whose high priests were Pound, Eliot and Stevens, and Crane perhaps.”

ThinkingWayWritingImportantTogetherMovingReadingStylePoetBritishPoundsPriestsAssuranceModernismAnthologyPhilipMoving AwayEliotHartCranes
Author:Billy Collins
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“I think the whole emphasis in England, in universities, on practical criticism (but not that so much as on historical criticism, knowing what period a line comes from) this is almost paralysing. In America, in University, we read - what? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, that is where we began. Shakespeare flaunted in the background. I'm not sure I agree with this, but I think that' for the young poet, the writing poet, it is not quite so frightening to go to university in America as it is in England, for these reasons.”

ThinkingWritingReasonWholeAmericaYoungLinesKnowingPoetPeriodsCriticismEnglandAgreeHistoricalUniversityPracticalsBackgroundsNot SureFrighteningEmphasisDylanEliotYeats
Author:Sylvia Plath
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“Writers in the nineteenth century - people like George Eliot and Flaubert - were accustomed to addressing particular communities with which they shared not only linguistic meanings but also an experience and history. Those communities have progressively split in the twentieth century, and grown more heterogeneous, and writers emerging from minority communities have found themselves addressing audiences closer to their experience and history - a phenomenon derided by conservative white men as identity politics and multiculturalism in the arts.”

PeopleMenArtFoundCommunityWhiteAudienceCenturyIdentityParticularConservativeMinoritiesPhenomenonSplitsWhite ManMulticulturalismAccustomedTwentieth CenturyEmergingNineteenth CenturyIdentity PoliticsEliot
Author:Pankaj Mishra
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“Every poet gets to choose what kind of community he or she serves with the poems, and it's true that there is a community for very difficult, challenging poetry. It's a community that's established itself over the last 80 years, that was originally, in effect, really started by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. They believed that poetry ought to contain learning, that it ought to rise upon all the learning that went before.”

KindDifficultCommunityChallengesPoetEliot
Author:Ted Kooser
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“You see that in the news constantly; done both the right way and the wrong way. The most recent example I can think of, obviously, is Lance Armstrong, who got it all wrong. Who wanted to apologize strategically, instead of abjectly. What got me interested was the repetitive nature of it. There's something so ritualized about it. Then the ritual needs to be reenacted very carefully and pretty frequently - Tiger Woods, and now Manti Te'o and Lance Armstrong, and a little earlier Anthony Weiner or Eliot Spitzer.”

ThinkingDoneRitualApologizingTigersRepetitiveEliot
Author:Jonathan Dee
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“What's that line from TS Eliot? To arrive at the place where you started, but to know it for the first time. I'm able to write about a breakup from a different place. Same brokenness. Same rock-bottom. But a little more informed, now I'm older. Thank God for growing up.”

KnowsWritingFirstsLittlesDifferentAbleLinesGrowing UpGrowingRocksFirst TimeBottomMoving OnBreakupThank GodGet OverBreak UpDifferent PlaceBrokennessBroken HeartedEliotHeart WrenchingAfter BreakupAfter Break Up
Author:Alanis Morissette
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