Quote Of The Day By T.S. Eliot: 'Do I Dare Disturb The Universe? In A Minute There Is...'

If you've ever talked yourself out of a decision and then talked yourself back into it an hour later, with indecision gnawing at your mind and the trepidation of committing to any one choice growing in you until you do nothing at all, T.S. Eliot, one of the defining poets of the 20th century, has already captured you in a verse.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri. He studied at Harvard and made the voyage across the ocean to England, becoming a British citizen by 1927. He produced some of the most profound and influential poems of the modern era, including "The Waste Land" in 1922 and "Four Quartets" in 1943. He also happened to collect honors from all around the world — the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, Britain's Order of Merit in 1948, and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, among others.

For all that success and enviable acclaim, Eliot also seemingly knew something about what it was like to feel decision paralysis in your day-to-day life. One of the his most famous early creations is a man who cannot bring himself to act at all. That character gave us one of the sharpest lines ever written about overthinking and how it can derail a life, which is why T.S. Eliot is today's quote of the day.

T.S. Eliot wrote: "Do I dare / Disturb the universe? / In a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."

These lines are from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which Eliot penned in 1910 and 1911 before he'd even finished his studies, and the poem sat unpublished for years until fellow poet Ezra Pound championed it. It landed in the June 1915 issue of Poetry magazine. The words belong to Prufrock, the timid narrator of the poem, who is so anxious that even eating a peach feels like the biggest decision in the world. It's more than a little eerie that a poet in the 20th century, in his early 20s, captured the loop of indecision that keeps so many of us stuck.

The quote is actually describing a very familiar trap. T.S. Eliot's protagonist, J. Alfred Prufrock, is so incapacitated by his conflicting thoughts that he deems even one small act of courage — that of speaking to a woman — as "disturbing the universe," which is exactly how overthinking works. Eliot further writes: "Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare eat a peach? / I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach."

When you overthink, you inflate ordinary risks until they feel cosmic. It is one thing to understand the butterfly effect — that our actions and decisions can have reverberating effects across a large domain — and quite another to be completely debilitated by the thought. The second half is even more relatable because a minute is all it takes to come at a decision, but that doesn't guarantee you won't change your mind in the next. Some people spend many a chapter of their lives shuffling between these two minutes, constantly arriving at a decision only for their thoughts to undermine it later.

So, "Do [we] dare disturb the universe?" If you've thought something through several times, you probably don't need more deliberation. Whatever your version of Prufrock's peach is, dare to eat it.

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