“I am afraid, that health begins, after seventy, and often long before, to have a meaning different from that which it had at thirty.”

A clear-eyed reflection on how the meaning of health changes with age · Letter to James Boswell, 1782

• Mortality
• Time

“Those who have no power to judge of past times but by their own, should always doubt their conclusions.”

Warning against judging history solely by present assumptions · Lives of the Poets, Milton

• Time
• Truth

“Every man's performances, to be rightly estimated, must be compared with the state of the age in which he lived, and with his own particular opportunities.”

Urging historical context when judging achievement · Preface to Shakespeare

• Time
• Truth

“Every period of time has produced these bubbles of artificial fame, which are kept up a while by the breath of fashion, and then break at once, and are annihilated.”

Describing fashionable reputation as something inflated and easily destroyed · Rambler No. 106

• Fame
• Time

“Misery is caused for the most part, not by a heavy crush of disaster, but by the corrosion of less visible evils, which canker enjoyment, and undermine security.”

Observing how persistent small troubles can erode happiness more than rare catastrophes · Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

• Despair
• Time

“The brightest hours of prosperity have their clouds, and the stream of life, if it is not ruffled by obstructions, will grow putrid by stagnation.”

Suggesting that both difficulty and movement are inseparable from a living life · Rambler No. 165

• Joy
• Time

“To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.”

Urging action when a genuine opportunity for good is present · The Patriot

• Hope
• Time

“We act as if life were without end, though we see and confess its uncertainty and shortness.”

Exposing the gap between what people know about mortality and how they live · Rambler No. 71

• Mortality
• Time

“It is well known, that time once past never returns; and that the moment which is lost is lost for ever.”

Stressing the irrecoverable nature of wasted time · Idler No. 14

• Mortality
• Time

“He that hopes to look back hereafter with satisfaction upon past years must learn to know the present value of single minutes.”

Making the wise use of small portions of time the basis of future satisfaction · Rambler No. 108

• Memory
• Time

“What we hope ever to do with ease we may learn first to do with diligence.”

Connecting eventual ease with patient practice · Lives of the Poets, Milton

• Art
• Time

“If one was to think constantly of death, the business of life would stand still.”

Arguing that awareness of mortality must not paralyse daily living · Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

• Death
• Time

“Sir, as a man advances in life, he gets what is better than admiration, --judgement, to estimate things at their true value.”

Contrasting youthful admiration with the discriminating judgement of age · Boswell, Life of Johnson

• Time
• Truth

“We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors' victory, though that victory itself will be temporary.”

Finding meaning in efforts whose value may only become apparent to later generations · Essay, Francis Herbert Bradley

• Despair
• Hope
• Time

“Life is always turned toward creation; the present only, keeps the past alive.”

Presenting the living present as the force that continually renews inherited culture · Lecture, Modern Tendencies in Poetry

• Art
• Memory
• Time

“He need not know what his poetry will come to mean to others; and a prophet need not understand the meaning of his prophetic utterance.”

Recognising that works may acquire meanings beyond the conscious intention of their creators · Essay, Virgil and the Christian World

• Poetry
• Time
• Truth

“What we need is not information but knowledge: the first step to knowledge is to recognize the differences between his form of thought and feeling and ours.”

Distinguishing genuine historical understanding from the accumulation of facts · Essay, Dante

• Time
• Truth

“Our problem being to form the future, we can only form it on the materials of the past; we must use our heredity, instead of denying it.”

Arguing that renewal depends upon engaging constructively with inherited culture · Essay, The Humanism of Irving Babbitt

• Hope
• Memory
• Time

“A classic can only occur when a civilization is mature; when a language and a literature are mature; and it must be the work of a mature mind.”

Connecting enduring literary achievement with maturity of mind, language and culture · Lecture, What is a Classic?

• Art
• Time

“If there is one word on which we can fix, which will suggest the maximum of what I mean by the term 'a classic', it is the word maturity.”

Making maturity central to Eliot's conception of the literary classic · Lecture, What is a Classic?

• Art
• Time

“Real poetry survives not only a change of popular opinion but the complete extinction of interest in the issues with which the poet was passionately concerned.”

Arguing that lasting poetry transcends the immediate controversies surrounding its creation · Essay, The Social Function of Poetry

• Fame
• Poetry
• Time

“The poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.”

Making historical awareness an enduring responsibility of the poet · Essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent

• Memory
• Poetry
• Time

“What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.”

Arguing that genuinely new art changes how earlier art is perceived · Essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent

• Art
• Memory
• Time

“The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.”

Presenting tradition as a living relationship in which past and present reshape one another · Essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent

• Art
• Memory
• Time