T. S. Eliot Quotes

We can none of us step into the same river twice, but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing, too

When we talk of leaving our childhood behind us, we might as well say that the river flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain behind.

The wave does not need to die to become water. She is already water.

What do we call the river? Every moment the water is changing, the shore is changing, every moment the environment is changing, what is the river then? It is the name of this series of changes.

Whenever anything changes and quits its proper limits, this change is at once the death of that which was before.

Time was a face on the water, and like the great river before them, it did nothing but flow.

I like René Descartes' theory about a ball of wax. You can change its form from solid to liquid, but it's still the same ball of wax. With acting, you are the same person in a different form. You can only be what you know, and you only truly know yourself.

We all have a wrong idea of ourselves. I am always changing, and I will continue to change. So, I never try to describe, define or judge myself.

I have to change to stay the same.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.

Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuee! Nuee! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone. And into the river that had been a stream . . . there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears . . . for it was a leaptear. But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh! I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

I've apparently been the victim of growing up, which apparently happens to all of us at one point or another. It's been going on for quite some time now, without me knowing it. I've found that growing up can mean a lot of things. For me, it doesn't mean I should become somebody completely new and stop loving the things I used to love. It means I've just added more things to my list.

From Bonheur de Vivre - I was thirty-five then - to this cut-out - I am eighty-two - I have not changed; not in the way my friends mean who want to compliment me, no matter what, on my good health, but because all this time I have looked for the same things, which I have perhaps realized by different means.

Nor is it strange That after changes upon changes, we are more or less the same

Home. It's being new and old all rolled into one. Measuring your new against old friends, old ways, old places, Knowing that as long as the old survives, you can keep changing as much as you want without the nightmare of waking up to a total stranger.

The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course.

The "new" in us is bound to notice the "old" that remains.

It's nice sometimes to be the river rather than the rock.

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

Stories are like a river that flows - you dip a bucket in it

Be a river - not a reservoir.

I think we need to remember...that a lot of energy was put into changing things to get us to the point where we are now. But being where we are now doesn't mean that we don't have to put in the same kind of energy to get us to a place where we ought to be.

There is a transformation, you see, when you just put four edges around it. That changes it. A new world is created.

The body and mind are continually changing, and are, in fact, only names of series of changeful phenomena, like rivers whose waters are in a constant state of flux, yet presenting the appearance of unbroken streams. Every particle in this body is continually changing; no one has the same body for many minutes together, and yet we think of it as the same body.