T. S. Eliot Quotes

What Thucydides said of the Greeks at the time of the Peleponnesian War applies to us at present [1860]. The Greeks did not understand each other any longer, though they spoke the same language; words received a different meaning in different parts.

It is an illusion to think that the matter can be resolved through words.

You guys are both saying the same thing. The only reason you're arguing is because you're using different words.

It hurts a lot when you cannot really comprehend what a person is saying in a meeting, or you don't even understand what you're reading in your contract.

I think we're still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate.

The only problem was that I couldn't communicate with Dario. He speaks Italian and I don't. We had a translator the whole time. I just felt that something was lost with the go between. He was a delightful man, but I wish we could have spoken the same language.

There is always that age-old thing about England and America being divided by a common language. You think that because we speak English and you speak English that you're bound to understand and like everything that we do. And of course you don't.

In Japan, you have no idea what they are saying, and they can't help you either. Nothing makes any sense. They're very polite, but you feel like a joke is being played on you the entire time you're there.

Bad human communication leaves us less room to grow.

If what is said does not concord with what was meant, what is to be done cannot be effected.

Half the promises people say were never kept, were never made.

Through over-long contention the truth is lost

We were like deaf people trying to dance to a beat we couldn't hear, long after the music actually stopped.

It's not what you tell your players that counts. It's what they hear.

Listen to all the conversations of our world, between nations as well as between individuals. They are, for the most part, dialogues of the deaf.

We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.

By deceiving one another through false assumptions and misrepresentations there has been, in reality, a great lapse and delay in achieving the real goals.

Are you two having some sort of strange human thing that you can’t follow what I’m saying? (Simi)

There is not so good an understanding between any two, but the exposure by the one of a serious fault in the other will produce a misunderstanding in proportion to its heinousness.

Your saying 'I do not understand you' is praise beyond my worth, and an insult you do not deserve.

So for all that we might speak words in each other's vicinity, this could never develop into anything that could be called a conversation. It was as though we were speaking in different languages. If the Dalai Lama were on his deathbed and the jazz musician Eric Dolphy were to try to explain to him the importance of choosing one's engine oil in accordance with changes in the sound of the bass clarinet, that exchange might have been more worthwhile and effective than my conversations with Noboru Wataya.

In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we donot know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.

I had always assumed we had an unspoken understanding about these things: that she didn't really mean I was a failure, and I really meant I would try to respect her opinions more. But listening to Auntie Lin tonight reminds me once agian: My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more. No doubt she told Auntie Lin I was going back to school to get a doctorate.

It was only later that I suffocated under the weight of his arguments, and his darker thoughts articulated. It was only later that our tongues produced landslides, that we become caught in the cracks between what we said and what we meant, until we could not find each other, did not trust the words in our own mouths.