"Four Quartets" is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were published individually over a six-year period. "The Little Gidding" is the last of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. The poems were not collected until Eliot's New York publisher printed them together in 1943. They were first published as a series in Great Britain in 1944 towards the end of Eliot's poetic career. Four Quartets are four interlinked meditations with the common theme being man's relationship with time, the universe, and the divine. (from Wikipedia.org)
"There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives"
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"What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from."
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"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
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"Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one."
