Quotes to inspire and reflect

Language is fossil poetry.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not been discovered.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

To fill the hour—that is happiness.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

There is properly no history; only biography.

In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.

It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‘Always do what you are afraid to do.’

The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Make yourself necessary to someone.

Art is a jealous mistress.

Here once the embattled farmers stood,

When Duty whispers low, Thou must,

If the red slayer think he slays,

I am the doubter and the doubt.

Snowy, Flowy, Blowy,

Adieu tristesse

In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.

To me … [ The Waste Land ] was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’.

Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.

Webster was much possessed by death

Shantih, shantih, shantih.

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

When lovely woman stoops to folly and

One of the low on whom assurance sits

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs.

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—

But at my back from time to time I hear

And still she cried, and still the world pursues,

I think we are in rats’ alley

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

April is the cruellest month, breeding

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

I gotta use words when I talk to you.

The nightingales are singing near

Birth, and copulation, and death.

And the wind shall say: ‘Here were decent godless people:

Midnight shakes the memory

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

At whatever time the deed took place— MACAVITY WASN’T THERE!