quotations about eternity
Beauty is a precarious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well. Often it seems to me to be an evil flower of nothingness, or else the cry of the world as it dies, or a desperate, sumptuous prayer.
EUGENE IONESCO
Present Past / Past Present
Man passes; he knows that he is dust; nothing is more evident than his frailty. If he should for a single moment forget it, what a chorus of voices would recall it to him! And yet, in the drop of existence which he absorbs, he takes in ages through memory and ages through presentiment. In the moments as they pass, he dimly sees eternity, and more than this, he possesses it by anticipation.
CHARLES WAGNER
Justice
Eternity, it is surely not necesssry to remind you, invests every state, whether of bliss or of suffering, with a mysterious and awful importance, entirely its own, and is the only property in the creation which gives that weight and moment to whatever it attaches, compared to which all sublunary joys and sorrows, all interests which know a period, fade into the most contemptible insignificance.
ROBERT HALL
funeral sermon for the Princess Charlotte of Wales
And can eternity belong to me,
Poor pensioner on the bounties of an hour?
EDWARD YOUNG
Night Thoughts
Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same House of Being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.
SYLVIA PLATH
Ariel
Eternity is but one immense, indivisible point, wherein there is neither first nor last, beginning nor ending, succession nor alteration, but is like God himself, one and the same for ever.
J. CASE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Eternity is an ocean, whereof we never see the shore; it is a deep, where we can find no bottom; a labyrinth, from whence we cannot extricate ourselves, and where we shall ever lose the door.
THOMAS BOSTON
Human Nature in its Fourfold State
Objects close to the eye shut out much larger objects on the horizon; and splendors born only of the earth eclipse the stars. So a man sometimes covers up the entire disc of eternity with a dollar, and quenches transcendent glories with a little shining dust.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus
Eternity.--Thy name
Or glad, or fearful, we pronounce, as thoughts
Wandering in darkness shape thee. Thou strange being,
Which art and must be, yet which contradict'st
All sense, all reasoning,--thou, who never wast
Less than thyself, and who still art thyself
Entire, though the deep draught which Time has taken
Equals thy present store--No line can reach
To thy unfathomed depths. The reasoning sage
Who can dissect a sunbeam, count the stars,
And measure distant worlds, is here a child,
And, humbled, drops his calculating pen.
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD
"Eternity"
Time's ruins build eternity's mansions.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL
The Power of Myth
Eternity is before me like a dark lamp.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Vala
All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
C. S. LEWIS
The Four Loves
O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it?
JAMES JOYCE
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
What we do now echoes in eternity.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
Those spacious regions where our fancies roam,
Pain'd by the past, expecting ills to come,
In some dread moment, by the fates assign'd,
Shall pass away, nor leave a rack behind;
And Time's revolving wheels shall lose at last
The speed that spins the future and the past:
And, sovereign of an undisputed throne,
Awful eternity shall reign alone.
PETRARCH
Triumph of Eternity
Time ... thou ceaseless lackey to eternity.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Rape of Lucrece
Our imagination so magnifies this present existence, by the power of continual reflection on it, and so attenuates eternity by not thinking of it at all, that we reduce eternity to nothingness, and expand a mere nothing to an eternity; and this habit is so inveterately rooted in us, that all the force of reason cannot induce us to lay it aside.
PASCAL
attributed, Day's Collacon