Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

T. S. Eliot

Where Is the Life

Topic: Wisdom & Understanding

CHORUSES FROM “THE ROCK”

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965), was an essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and "one of the twentieth century's major poets". Born in St. Louis, in the United States, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25, settling, working, and marrying there. He eventually became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39, renouncing his American passport.
Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), which was seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement. It was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including The Waste Land (1922), "The Hollow Men" (1925), "Ash Wednesday" (1930), and Four Quartets (1943).[4] He was also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry".

(1888-1965) Humanism, Arts and Sciences
Choruses from "The Rock"

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, p. 96 [T. S. Eliot, Choruses from "The Rock"].

T. S. Eliot