T. S. ELIOT QUOTES

The Cocktail Party (1949)

It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous.

Resign yourself to be the fool you are.

You will find that you survive humiliation

And that's an experience of incalculable value.

That is the worst moment, when you feel you have lost

The desires for all that was most dersirable,

Before you are contented with what you can desire;

Before you know what is left to be desired;

And you go on wishing that you could desire

What desire has left behind. But you cannot understand.

How could you understand what it is to feel old?

We die to each other daily.

What we know of other people

Is only our memory of the moments

During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.

To pretend that they and we are the same

Is a useful and convenient social convention

Which must sometimes broken. We must also remember

That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

What is hell? Hell is oneself.

Hell is alone, the other figures in it

Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from

And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

Half the harm that is done in this world

Is due to people who want to feel important.

They don't mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them.

Or they do not see it, or they justify it

Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle

To think well of themselves.

There are several symptoms

Which must occur together, and to a marked degree,

To qualify a patient for my sanitorium:

And one of them is an honest mind. That is one of the causes of their suffering.

To men of a certain type

The suspicion that they are incapable of loving

Is as disturbing to their self-esteem

As, in cruder men, the fear of impotence.

I should really like to think there's something wrong with me —

Because, if there isn't then there's something wrong,

Or at least, very different from what it seemed to be,

With the world itself — and that's much more frightening!

Everyone's alone — or so it seems to me.

They make noises, and think they are talking to each other;

They make faces, and think they understand each other.

And I'm sure they don't. Is that a delusion?

Can we only love

Something created in our own imaginations?

Are we all in fact unloving and unloveable?

Then one is alone, and if one is alone

Then lover and beloved are equally unreal

And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams.

I shall be left with the inconsolable memory

Of the treasure I went into the forest to find

And never found, and which was not there

And is perhaps not anywhere? But if not anywhere

Why do I feel guilty at not having found it?

Disillusion can become itself an illusion

If we rest in it.

Two people who know they do not understand each other,

Breeding children whom they do not understand

And who will never understand them.

There is another way, if you have the courage.

The first I could describe in familiar terms

Because you have seen it, as we all have seen it,

Illustrated, more or less, in lives of those about us.

The second is unknown, and so requires faith —

The kind of faith that issues from despair.

The destination cannot be described;

You will know very little until you get there;

You will journey blind. But the way leads towards possession

Of what you have sought for in the wrong place.

We must always take risks. That is our destiny.

If we all were judged according to the consequences

Of all our words and deeds, beyond the intention

And beyond our limited understanding

Of ourselves and others, we should all be condemned.

Only by acceptance of the past will you alter its meaning.

Every moment is a fresh beginning.