T. S. Eliot Quotes

It's not finding what's lost, it's understanding what you've found.

I saw more than I can tell / And I understood more than I saw.

We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.

There are many things I’ve written that I didn’t really understand until a long time later.

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.

A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery; and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice.

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything.

The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.

Consciousness of a fact is not knowing it: if it were, the fish would know more of the sea than the geographers and the naturalists.

Of the Logos which is as I describe it men always prove to be uncomprehending, both before they have heard it and when once they have heard it. For although all things happen according to this Logos, they [men] are like people of no experience, even when they experience such words and deeds as I explain, when I distinguish each thing according to its constitution and declare how it is; but the rest of men fail to notice what they do after they wake up just as they forget what they do when asleep.

What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent

Experience teaches us not to assume that the obvious is clearly understood

We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.

Only when one is able to grasp wideness can one possess it.

There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.

I observe the world and the people surrounding me.

Marlo taught me things I thought I knew.

Knowledge, may it be said, is higher than magic and is more to be sought. It is quite possible to see what is happening and yet not know what is forward, for while seeing is believing, it does not follow that either seeing or believing is knowing.

Much learning does not teach understanding.

If you will read again what is written, you will see how it was.

Knowing is not understanding. There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.

If you don't know about it, you can't get it.

A signal is comprehended if it serves to make us notice the object or situation it bespeaks. A symbol is understood when we conceive the idea it presents.