Great Throughts Treasury

"The voice of the Devil. All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following errors: 1. That man has two real existing principles; vis; a body and a soul. 2. That energy, called evil, is alone from body, and that reason, called good, is alone from the soul. 3. That God will torment man in eternity for the following energies. But the following contraries to these are true: 1. Man has no body distinct from his soul; for that called body is a portion of soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of the soul in this age. 2. Energy is the only life, and is from the body; and reason is bound or outward circumference of energy. 3. Energy is eternal delight." - William Blake

"The world of imagination is the world of eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated body. This world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation, of vegetation, is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the permanent realities of everything which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature." - William Blake

"An hour spent in hate is an eternity withdrawn from love." - Ludwig Börne, fully Karl Ludwig Börne

"None can comprehend eternity but the eternal God. Eternity is an ocean, whereof we shall 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

"Consider and act with reference to the true ends of existence. This world is but the vestibule of an immortal life. Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin

"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." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin

"This world is but the vestibule of an immortal life. Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin

"As character to be used for eternity must be formed in time and in good time, so good habits to be used for happiness in this life must be formed early; and then they will be a treasure to be desired in the house of the wise, and an oil of life in their dwellings." - George Barrell Cheever

"The habits of time are the soul's dress for eternity. Habit passes with its owner beyond this world into a world where destiny is determined by character, and character is the sum and expression of all preceding habit." - George Barrell Cheever

"If we stretch our thought as far as they can reach, eternity is still before us." -

"Death stamps the characters and conditions of men for eternity. As death finds them in this world, so will they be in the next." - Nathaniel Emmons

"Time is given us that we may take care for eternity; and eternity will not be too long to regret the loss of our time if we have misspent it." - François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon

"Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

"I am fully convinced that the soul is indestructible, and that its activity will continue through eternity. It is like the sun, which, to our eyes, seems to set at night; but it has in reality only gone to diffuse its light elsewhere." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Great art is an instant arrested in eternity." - James G. Huneker, fully James Gibbons Huneker

"Deliverance is out of time into eternity, and is achieved by obedience and docility to the eternal Nature of Things. We have been given free will, in order that we may will our self-will out of existence and so come to live continuously in a “state of grace.” All our actions must be directed, in the last analysis, to making ourselves passive in relation to the activity and the being of divine Reality. We are, as it were, aeolian harps, endowed with the power either to expose themselves to the wind of the Spirit or to shut themselves away from it." - Aldous Leonard Huxley

"The beatitude into which the enlightened soul is delivered is something quite different from pleasure... Blessedness depends on non-attachment and selflessness, therefore can be enjoyed without satiety and without revulsion; is a participation in eternity, and therefore remains itself without diminution or fluctuation." - Aldous Leonard Huxley

"The causal process takes place within time and cannot possibly result in deliverance from time. Such a deliverance can only be achieved as a consequence of the intervention of eternity in the temporal domain; and eternity cannot intervene unless the individual will makes a creative act of self-denial, thus producing, as it were, a vacuum into which eternity can flow." - Aldous Leonard Huxley

"The present moment is the only aperture through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which charity can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time." - Aldous Leonard Huxley

"Great truths are portions of the soul of man; great souls are portions of eternity." - James Russell Lowell

"A small trouble is like a pebble. Hold it too close to your eye and it fills the whole world and puts everything out of focus. Hold it at a proper viewing distance and it can be examined and properly classified. Throw it at your feet and it can be seen in its true setting, just one more tiny bump on the pathway to eternity." - Celia Luce

"Transiency is stamped on all our possessions, occupations, and delights. 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. Which do you mean that they shall be for you?" - Alexander Maclaren

"The thought of eternity consoles for the shortness of life." - Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes

"Falsehood is a hurry; it may be at any moment detected and punished; truth is calm, serene; its judgment is on high; its king cometh out of the chambers of eternity." - Joseph Parker

"The earth we live on is so small that even if someone was honored by everyone on our planet it is still insignificant. Also, a person’s lifetime is so short that even if he received honor and approval his entire life, it is so short in comparison with eternity. This is the ultimate success an approval-seeker can hope for, but the reality is that even if you spend you entire life trying to win the approval of others, only a small number of people will know and approve of you. The approval you do gain lasts a very short time and is soon forgotten as if it never was." - Bachya Ibn Pekudah

"No labor is hard, no time is long, wherein the glory of eternity is the mark we level at." - Francis Quarles

"There’s no one more openly irreverent than a lover. He or she jumps up on the scale opposite eternity and claims to balance it. And no one more secretly reverent." -

"In all exact knowledge the mind knows itself under the form of eternity; that is to say;, in ever such act it is eternal and knows itself as eternal. This eternity is not a persistence in time after the dissolution of the body, no more than pre-existence in time, for it is not commensurable with time at all. And there is associated with it a state or quality of perfection called the intellectual love of God." -

"Didst thou every descry a glorious eternity in a winged moment of time? Didst thou ever see a bright infinite in the narrow point of an object? Then thou knowest what spirit means - the spire-top, whither all things ascend harmoniously, where they meet and sit contented in an unfathomed Depth of Life." - Peter Sterry

"All creatures have existed eternally in the divine essence, as in their exemplar. So far as they conform to the divine idea, all beings were, before their creation, one thing with the essence of God. (God creates into time what was and is in eternity.” Eternally, all creatures are God in God... So far as they are in God, they are the same life, the same essence, the same power, the same One, and nothing less." - Henry Suso, aka Amandus or Saint Henry Suso

"If people would but provide for eternity with the same solicitude and real care as they do for this life, they could not fail of heaven." - John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury

"A conscience void of offense, before God and man, is an inheritance for eternity." - Daniel Webster

"If we work upon marble, it will perish; if we work upon bronze, time will efface it; if we build temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal souls, if we imbue them with just principles of action, with fear of wrong and love of right, we engrave on those tables something which no time can obliterate, and which will brighten and brighten through all eternity." - Daniel Webster

"My soul is God, my soul is eternity." - Ani NULL

"All souls are prepared to eternity." - Apocrypha NULL

"In time there is something indivisible - namely, the instant; and there is something else which endures - namely, time. But in eternity the indivisible now stands always still." -

"If all the gold in the world were melted down into a solid cube, it would be about the size of an eight-room house. If a man got possession of all that gold - billions of dollars' worth, he could not buy a friend, character, peace of mind, clear conscience, or a sense of eternity." - Charles F. Banning

"“What is eternity?” was a question once asked at the deaf and dumb institution of Paris, and the beautiful and striking answer was given by one of the pupils, “The lifetime of the Almighty.”" -

"Eternity is in love with the productions of time." - William Blake

"He who binds to himself a joy does the winged life destroy. But he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternity's sunrise." - William Blake

"To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, to hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour." - William Blake

"If you think of the infinite resources of eternity you have little cause to take pleasure in any continuation of your name." - Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL

"That God is eternal, is agreed by all who possess reason. What then is eternity?... Eternity is the complete and simultaneous possession of endless life in a single whole... God lives ever in an eternal present, his knowledge transcends all movement of time, and abides in the indivisibility of his present; he grasps the past and the future in all their infinite extent, and with his indivisible cognition he contemplates all events as if they were even now taking place." - Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL

"It would be well for us all, old and young, to remember that our words and actions, ay, and our thoughts also, are set upon never-stopping wheels, rolling on and on unto the pathway of eternity." - M. M. Brewster, fully Margaret Maria Brewster Gordon

"We are forming characters for eternity. Forming characters! Whose? our own or other? Both - and in that momentous fact lies the peril and responsibility of our existence. Who is sufficient for the thought?" - Elihu Burritt

"'Tis very puzzling on the brink of what is called Eternity to stare, and know no more of what is here, than there." -

"Music is the language of praise; and one of the most essential preparations for eternity is delight in praising God; a higher acquirement, I do think, than even delight and devotedness to prayer." - Allan Chalmers, fully Allan Knight Chalmers

"Every action of our lives touches in some chord that will vibrate in eternity." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin

"The body, that is but dust; the soul, is a bud of eternity." - Nathanial Culverwell, also spelled Nathaniel Culverwell