No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice a continual extinction of personality.

We shall often find that not only the best. But the most individual part of an artist's work may be those in which his ancestors assert their immortality most vigorously.

Tradition is a matter of great significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves in the first place the historical sense.

A sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together. This is what makes the artist most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity. The difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show.

Fragments from 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' by T.S. Eliot.