“The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.”
“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.”
T. S. Eliot
“This love is silent.”
T. S. Eliot
“For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.”
T. S. Eliot
“Atheism should always be encouraged (i.e. rationalistic not emotional atheism) for the sake of the Faith.”
T. S. Eliot
“Mr. Aldous Huxley, who is perhaps one of those people who have to perpetrate thirty bad novels before producing a good one, has a certain natural — but little developed — aptitude for seriousness.”
T. S. Eliot