A quote by the author T. S. Eliot. This line appears in Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets, where he meditates on time, memory, and the tension between temporal experience and a transcendent “still point”. The phrase suggests that humans often avoid or soften the harshness of reality because fully perceiving it, its impermanence, suffering, and complexity, can be overwhelming.
Eliot explores how consciousness is limited, and how people rely on art, faith, and imagination to approach truths that might otherwise be unbearable.
