Eliot considered this poem, written in his teens, a work of juvenilia.

Apparently a quote from animator Chuck Jones.

The opening line.

The correct wording is here, top line.

Correct source: Edward Gorey in Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer (2011). Gorey illustrated Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats in 1982.

In "Burnt Norton" (1935 poem, from Four Quartets), Eliot writes, "At the still point of the turning world." Although the still point can be interpreted as a reference to God or to Christ, Eliot does not say that Christ is the still point.

Correct source: Gerald Stanley Lee, Crowds: A Moving Picture of Democracy (1913).

In context: "The general point of view [of these essays] may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion. I am quite aware that the first term is completely vague, and easily lends itself to clap-trap; I am aware that the second term is at present without definition, and easily lends itself to what is almost worse than clap-trap, I mean temperate conservatism; the third term does not rest with me to define."

Eliot wrote "For the pattern is new in every moment / And every moment is a new and shocking / Valuation of all we have been," and he wrote "And so each venture / Is a new beginning." Someone seems to have combined these two passages from "East Coker" to produce a sound bite.

Spoken by the First Tempter, an odious character

In context: "What is surprising about the poetry of Dante is that it is, in one sense, extremely easy to read. It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."

Often misreported as Eliot's answer to a question about his source of inspiration, and usually with the addressee changed to "dear lady" or "my dear." In context: "At the conclusion of a lecture or a reading of his poetry at some town not far from Boston, an enthusiastic lady is supposed to have expressed surprise at his radiant and youthful appearance and to have asked him how he ever managed it. 'Gin and drugs, Madam—gin and drugs!' the poet is supposed to have replied."

The lines (spoken by the character Henry Harcourt-Reilly) continue: "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."

Eliot wrote of "A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)." The parenthetical line has been recontextualized and simplified to refer more explicitly to Christian commitment.

Spoken by the character Edward Chamberlayne.

Spoken by the character Sweeney.

Spoken by the character Celia Coplestone.

No known source, but the sentiment is not especially Eliotic.

Correct source: Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886).

Spoken by the character Sir Claude Mulhammer.

Often misquoted (e.g., "Bad artists copy; great artists steal" or "The immature poet imitates; the mature poet plagiarizes"). Sometimes misattributed to William Faulkner, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, or Lionel Trilling. In context: "One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different."

Spoken by the character Agatha.

Spoken by the play's chorus.

Most likely the self-referential invention of a wag. Attributed in TLS 6158 (9 Apr. 2021): 32 to "an early, helpful reader" who penciled this line in the margin of a Bodleian Library book. The columnist calls the line "an Eliot quotation," but we find no evidence of that.

Sometimes attributed to Vernon Grounds, source unspecified.

Eliot's publisher, Robert Giroux, asked Eliot "if he agreed with the definition that most editors are failed writers." Eliot replied, "Perhaps, but so are most writers." Quoted by Giroux in "A Personal Memoir," T. S. Eliot: The Man and his Work, ed. Allen Tate (1967): 339.

The correct wording is here, top line. For further discussion of this misquotation, see the Quote Investigator website.

In context: "As a playwright, Eliot is still a little dazed by the footlights. He resorts to chalk and blackboard to work out his plots. Says he: 'My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up & down.'"

Spoken by the character Henry Harcourt-Reilly.

In context: "Of course one can 'go too far' and except in directions in which we can go too far there is no interest in going at all; and only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out just how far one can go."

Correct source: Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Quotation and Originality" (1859).

Spoken by the character Harry Monchensey.

The passage continues: "Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career."

The correct wording is here, top line.

In a 2000 article on then-current uses of the telephone, Austin Bunn describes a "teleclass" instructor named Sandra: "She opens tonight's session with a line she claims is from T. S. Eliot" ("Call of the Wired," Brill's Content 3.5). This skeptical moment may be the source of all the earnest subsequent attributions of this quote to Eliot.

Spoken by the character Agatha.

A comment made in an interview (New York Post Magazine 22 Sept. 1963: 7).

These lines appear on Eliot's memorial in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey.

In After Strange Gods (1934 lecture series) Eliot writes of his graduate studies in Sanskrit and Eastern metaphysics: "A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after—and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys—lay in trying to erase from my mind all the categories and kinds of distinction common to European philosophy from the time of the Greeks."

Leonard Woolf published an autobiography with this title in 1969, the year of his death. Woolf attributes the title to Montaigne, but it is a paraphrase rather than an exact quotation of that author.

Lines spoken by the play's hero, the sainted 12th-century Archbishop of Canturbury Thomas Becket.

Around 1930, William Empson asked Eliot whether a poet should try to write every week. Eliot responded, "Taking the question in general, I should say, in the case of many poets, that the most important thing for them to do ... is to write as little as possible." (The ellipses represent a pause, not an omission.) Empson, "The Style of the Master," T. S. Eliot: A Symposium, ed. Tambimuttu and Richard March (1948).

Quoted by Eileen Simpson in Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir (1982): 173.

In The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1932-33 lecture series), Eliot speculates that writing for the theater might give poets "immediate compensation for the pains of turning blood into ink. As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game." He does not say that turning blood into ink is the purpose of literature.

Though it seems plausibly Eliot's in both language and substance, there is no definite evidence tracing this saying to Eliot. See the Quote Investigator website for details.

In context: "[Aristotle] provides an eternal example—not of laws, or even of method, for there is no method except to be very intelligent, but of intelligence itself swiftly operating the analysis of sensation to the point of principle and definition.

In context: "If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause."

This dictum predates Eliot's birth by at least two decades. Nineteenth-century texts attribute it to J. Tholuck but do not specify a source.

In his 2010 memoir Half a Life, Darin Strauss writes: "Things don't go away. They become you. There is no end, as T. S. Eliot somewhere says." Because Strauss does not use quotation marks, it is unclear whether he is attributing all three of these short sentences or only the last one to Eliot. As a result, the full quote is sometimes attributed to Strauss and sometimes to Eliot. In "The Dry Salvages" (1941 poem, from Four Quartets), Eliot writes: "There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing" and "There is no end, but addition." However, "Things don't go away. They become you" is Strauss, not Eliot.

Lines spoken by the play's hero, the sainted 12th-century Archbishop of Canturbury Thomas Becket.

The final lines of the poem. Italicized in the original.

This aphorism has been attributed to John Lennon, Bertrand Russell, Soren Kierkegaard, and Laurence J. Peter, as well as Eliot. On his website, Quote Investigator, Garson O'Toole notes that it appears in the 1912 novel Phrynette Married, by Marthe Troly-Curtin. Whether the saying precedes Troly-Curtin or was invented by her is unknown.

In context: "In our time, we read too many new books, or are oppressed by the thought of the new books which we are neglecting to read; we read many books, because we cannot know enough people; we cannot know everybody whom it would be to our benefit to know, because there are too many of them.

Correct source: George Eliot, Middlemarch

Spoken to the graduating class at Milton Academy, a Massachusetts prep school Eliot had attended years earlier.

In context: "When a Cat adopts you, and I am not superstitious at all I don't mean only Black cats, there is nothing to be done about it except to put up with it and wait until the wind changes, and perhaps he will go away of his own accord and never be heard of again; but as I say there is nothing you can do about it. You must for the present provide liver and rabbit, and a comfortable seat by the fire; and perhaps he will disappear. I am sorry to give such cold consolation, but one might as well face facts."

In context: "For most of us, there is only the unattended / Moment, the moment in and out of time, / ... or music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts."