quotations about eternity
Yes, from the mountain of eternity we shall look down, and behold the whole plain spread before us. Down here we get lost and confused in the devious valleys that run off from the rdots of the hills everywhere, and we cannot make out where the streams are going, and what there is behind that low shoulder of the hill yonder. But when we get to the summit peak and look down, it will all shape itself into one consistent whole, and we shall see it all at once.
THOMAS BOSTON
attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers
I will pause to consider this eternity from which the subsequent ones derive.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"A History of Eternity"
Eternity is so certain and so terrible that a thousand lives would not suffice to prepare for it.
ALPHONSE MARIE LOUIS DE LAMARTINE
Last Night and Execution of the Girondists
He that will often put eternity and the world before him, and who will dare to look steadfastly at both of them, will find that the more he contemplates them, the former will grow greater and the latter less.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon: Or
We have the hunger for eternity in our souls, the thought of eternity in our hearts, the destination for eternity written on our inmost being, and the need to ally ourselves with eternity proclaimed by the most short-lived trifles of time. Either these things will be the blessing or the curse of our lives.
ALEXANDER MACLAREN
Sermons Preached in Manchester
The sum total of all sums total is eternal.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
The time will come when every change shall cease,
This quick revolving wheel shall rest in peace:
No summer then shall glow, not winter freeze;
Nothing shall be to come, and nothing past,
But an eternal now shall ever last.
PETRARCH
Triumph of Eternity
When you can live forever what do you live for?
STEPHENIE MEYER
Twilight
I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Dhalgren
Forever is composed of Nows--
'Tis not a different time--
Except for Infiniteness--
And Latitude of Home--
EMILY DICKINSON
"Forever is composed of Nows"
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Adonais
This speck of life in time's great wilderness
This narrow isthmus 'twixt two boundless seas,
The past, the future, two eternities!
THOMAS MOORE
Lalla Rookh
Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair