How we cite our quotes: (Line)
Quote #1
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres— (332-333)
The speaker reflects on the writing career he's had leading up to "Four Quartets." In a gesture of humility, he admits that these twenty years have been largely wasted. Why? Well because the twenty years have taken place between two World Wars, and no matter how much he's tried to write the truth, humanity is still prepared to make all the same mistakes it made twenty years earlier. No progress has happened.
Quote #2
It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution (476-479)
As you get older, you start to realize that the idea of human progress is a little bit farfetched. If anything, it starts to look as if things have steadily gotten worse for humanity throughout history. Sure, we don't die from the plague anymore. Instead, we die in wars that wipe out tens of millions of people in only a few years. The idea of evolution in this sense is pretty silly, since it's really tough to argue that human beings are becoming stronger or better as time goes on.
Quote #3
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness. (483-487)
In the past, we might have had the kind of spiritual experience that the speaker wants us to have, but we missed the meaning of this experience because we don't really know what to look for. That said, all is not lost. If we can somehow approach the meaning that this spiritual experience was supposed to have, we can still recover the truth that we missed the first time around. This won't necessarily be a happy experience, because true learning rarely is.