T. S. Eliot Quotes

Time is the devourer of all things.

Can we wonder that men perish and are forgotten when their noblest and most enduring works decay?

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Time destroys everything.

Time is not kind to everything.

Dust, in the end, settles on everything.

Everything is created to be annihilated.

I would rather be ashes than dust.

To whatever end. Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? They have passed like rain on the mountains. Like wind in the meadow. The days have gone down in the west. Behind the hills, into shadow. How did it come to this?

Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.

How everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up as trash.

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced The rich proud cost of outworn buried age; When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed And brass eternal slave to mortal rage; When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the watery main, Increasing store with loss and loss with store; When I have seen such interchange of state, Or state itself confounded to decay; Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, That Time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

Death devours all lovely things.

Uneasily the leaves fall at this season, forgetting what to do or where to go; the red amnesiacs of autumn drifting thru the graveyard forest. What they have forgotten they have forgotten: what they meant to do instead of fall is not in earth or time recoverable the fossils of intention, the shapes of rot.

Time touches all things with a destroying hand.

All things fade and quickly turn to myth.

The course of Nature seems a course of Death, And nothingness the whole substantial thing.

What cities, as great as this, have... promised themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some. The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others... Here stood their citadel, but now grown over with weeds; there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruins.

There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.

Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie, Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and-sans End!

History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?

it is all ash and dry leaves and grief gone like an ocean liner.

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost.