quotes, quotations and passages on eternity

Eternity is not something that
begins after you're dead. It is going
on all the time. We are in it now.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Every situation, every moment--is of infinite worth; for it is the representative of a whole eternity. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment and will never be more divine in the lapse of the ages. Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but when I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away but eternity remains. Henry David Thoreau

Our theories of the eternal are as valuable as are those which a chick which has not broken its way through its shell might form of the outside world. the Buddha

There is nothing more lonely than eternity. And nothing is more cozy for us than to be a human being. This indeed is another contradiction--how can we keep the bonds of our humanness and still venture gladly and purposefully into the absolute loneliness of eternity? Carlos Castaneda To Zen, time and eternity are one. D.T. Suzuki

God exists in eternity. The only point where eternity meets time
is in the present. The present is the only time there is.

Marianne Williamson

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See, if you can, eternity in the hour that passes.

Arabian proverb

Behold, I have reached the peak of the mountain and my spirit
has taken flight in the heavens of freedom and liberation. I have
gone far, far away, O children of my mother; the hills beyond the
mists are now hidden from my view, the last traces of the valleys
have been flooded by the ocean of serenity, and the paths and
trails have been erased by the hand of oblivion. The roar of
ocean waves has faded. I no longer hear anything but the
anthem of eternity, which harmonizes with the spirit.

Khalil Gibran

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

William Wordsworth

Time is . . . Too slow for those who wait,
Too swift for those who fear,
Too long for those who grieve,
Too short for those who rejoice;
But for those who love. . . Time is Eternity!

Henry van Dyke

During your life, everything you do and everyone you meet rubs off
in some way. Some bit of everything you experience stays with everyone
you've ever known, and nothing is lost. That's what is eternal, these little
specks of experience in a great, enormous river that has no end.

Harriet Doerr

All great natures delight in stability; all great people find
eternity affirmed in the very promise of their faculties.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We who live in this nervous age would be wise to meditate on
our lives and our days long and often before the face of God
and on the edge of eternity. For we are made for eternity as
certainly as we are made for time, and as responsible
moral beings we must deal with both.

A.W. Tozer

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.

Khalil Gibran

I believe in the immortality of the soul, not in the sense in which
I accept the demonstrable truths of science, but as
a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God's work.

John Fiske

Eternity is not the hereafter. Eternity has nothing to do with time. . . .
This is it. If you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. The
experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.
Heaven is not the place to have the experience;
here's the place to have the experience.

Joseph Campbell

It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine.
I am in it, as the butterfly in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come,
it is now. Now is eternity; now is immortal life.

Richard Jefferies

Millions of persons long for immortality who do not know
what to do with themselves on a rainy afternoon.

Susan Ertz

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Going back to the origin is called peace; it means reversion
to destiny. Reversion to destiny is called eternity. Those
who know eternity are called enlightened.

Lao-Tzu

It is not possible that we should remember that we existed before our
body, for our body can bear no trace of such existence, neither can
eternity be defined in terms of time or have any relation to time.
But notwithstanding, we feel and know that we are eternal.

Baruch Spinoza

The doctrine of pre-existence pours a wonderful flood of light
upon the otherwise mysterious problem of people's origin.
It shows that human beings, as spirits, were begotten and born
of heavenly parents and reared to maturity in the eternal mansions
of the Father, prior to coming upon the earth in temporal bodies
to undergo an experience in mortality.

Heber J. Grant

To every one of us there must come a time when the whole universe
will be found to have been a dream, when we find the soul is
infinitely better than its surroundings. It is only a question of time,
and time is nothing in the infinite.

Shirdi Sai Baba

Eternity has no gray hairs. The flowers fade, the heart withers, people
grow old and die, the world lies down in the sepulchre of ages,
but time writes no wrinkles on the brow of eternity.

Reginald Heber

What we call eternity may be but an endless series of transitions
which people call deaths, abandonments of home, going ever
to fairer scenes and loftier heights.

Edmund Bulwer-Lytton

You may tell me that my hand and foot are only imaginary symbols
of my existence. I could believe you, but you never, never can
convince me that the I is not an eternal reality, and that the
spiritual is not the true and real part of me.

Alfred Tennyson

Eternity is called whole, not because it has parts, but
because it is lacking in nothing.

Thomas Aquinas

There is no hurry. You are eternal. If you forget something
in this life, there will be plenty of time again.

Emmanuel

In the external scheme of things, shining moments are as brief
as the twinkling of an eye, yet such twinklings are what eternity
is made of--moments when we human beings can say, "I love you,"
"I'm proud of you," "I forgive you," "I'm grateful for you."
That's what eternity is made of: invisible, imperishable good stuff.

Fred Rogers
The World According to Mr. Rogers