Thomas Stearns Eliot Zitate

seite 5

„Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch“

„Poesie kann sich mitteilen, auch ehe sie verstanden ist.“

„Das Nützliche tun, das Mutige sagen, über das Schöne nachdenken: das reicht für das Leben eines Menschen.“

„Die Menschheit kann nicht sehr viel Realität ertragen.“

„Nur wer riskiert zu weit zu gehen, kann herausfinden, wie weit er gehen kann.“

„Manchmal werden Dinge möglich, wenn wir sie schlimm genug wollen.“

„Das meiste Böse auf dieser Welt wird von Menschen mit guten Absichten getan.“

„Die Existenz von Bibliotheken liefert den besten Beweis dafür, dass wir noch Hoffnung auf die Zukunft des Menschen haben können.“

“Then spoke the thunder
DA Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed.”

“We must learn to suffer more.”

“Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question”

“I am glad you have a Cat, but I do not believe it is So remarkable a cat as My Cat.”

“And indeed there will be time to wonder, 'Do I dare?', and 'Do I dare?”

“Only through time time is conquered”

“The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence”

“It is impossible to say just what I mean!”

“My mind may be American but my heart is British.”

“The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

The dancers are all gone under the hill.”

“Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow”

“Hell is oneself,
Hell is alone.”

“Till Human voices wake us, and we drown.”

“Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment.”

“The journey, Not the destination matters…”

“Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness…”

“In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not.”

“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.”

“The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood--
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.”

“Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?”

“Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.”

“I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.”

“The still point in a turning world.”

“We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.”

“And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And a hundred visions and revisions”

“The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”

“The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.”

“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”