This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"We are citizens of eternity." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
"The Bible is a window in this prison of hope, through which we look into eternity." - John Sullivan Dwight
"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, fully Henry Jackson Van Dyke
"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity." - Albert Einstein
"It is a very serious duty, perhaps of all duties the most serious, to look into one's own character and conduct, and accurately read one's own heart. It is virtually looking into eternity, and all its vast and solemn realities, which must appear delightful or awful, according as the heart appears to be conformed or not conform to God." - Nathaniel Emmons
"No earthly purpose satisfies man’s longing to find his eternal reason for being... Man seeks incessantly for the meaning of life until he discovers the single eternal purpose for his existence. That purpose is the same for every man and woman. God created us because He longs to enter into fellowship with us. We belong to Him by right of creation. We can never know order and harmony in this life until we choose to establish a right relationship with God... Our search for meaning to life will end only when we establish that personal relationship with God and begin our walk with Him - for time and for eternity. Then comes that glorious personal fulfillment described in holy writ as the “peace that passes all understanding.”" - Jerry Falwell
"No man can pass into eternity, for he is already in it." - Frederick William Farrar
"In the light of eternity we shall see that what we desired would have been fatal to us, and that what we would have avoided was essential to our well-being." - François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
"'As above, so below' means that the two worlds are instantaneously seen to be one when we realize our essential unity with God... The One and the many, time and eternity, are all One." - Reshad Feild, born Richard Timothy Feild
"Be always resolute with the present hour. Every moment is of infinite value; for it is the representative of eternity." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Peace is the first thing the angels sang. Peace is the mark of the sons of God. Peace is the nurse of love. Peace is the mother of unity. Peace is the rest of blessed souls. Peace is the dwelling place of eternity." - Pope Leo I, aka Pope Leo The Great, Pope Saint Leo I NULL
"Eternity has no gray hairs! The flowers fade, the heart withers, man grows old and dies, the world lies down in the sepulcher of ages, but time writes no wrinkles on the brow of eternity." - Reginald Heber
"Eternity enters into time, and it is in time that all movement takes place... Eternity is not limited by the conditions of time, and time is eternal in virtue of its cyclic recurrence." - Hermetica - Asclepius III NULL
"Merely to seek greater ease and comfort... through the destruction of the eternal code set up for all ages by the God of Eternity, is not and never can be Reform. Judaism seeks to lift us to its height, how dare we attempt to drag it down to our level?" - Samson Raphael Hirsch
"Moments are sparks of eternity." - Marian Hofstein
"You can throw yourselves away. You can become of no use in the universe except for a warning. You can lose your souls. Oh, what a loss is that! The perversion and degradation of every high and immortal power for an eternity! And shall this be true of any one of you? Will you be lost when One has come from heaven, traveling in the greatness of His strength, and with garments dyed in blood, on purpose to guide you home - home to a Father’s house - to an eternal home?" -
"When time ends, eternity begins." - James Monroe Hubbert
"We find that the religions, whose theology has been least preoccupied with events in time and most concerned with eternity, have been consistently the least violent and most humane in political practice." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"Time is a child of eternity, and resembles its parent as much as it can." - William Ralph Inge
"Time is but the shadow of the world upon the background of Eternity." - Jerome K. Jerome, fully Jerome Klapka Jerome
"Buying, possessing, accumulating - this is not worldliness. But doing this in the love of it, with no love of God paramount - doing it so that thoughts of eternity and God are an intrusion - doing it so that one’s spirit is secularized in the process; this is worldliness." - Herrick Johnson
"I, a wanderer through life on the way to eternity, believe in traveling light. Why should I be burdened with possessions which I cannot take with me hence?" - Kagan NULL
"It is very dangerous to go into eternity with possibilities which one has oneself prevented from becoming realities. A possibility is a hint from God. One must follow it. In every man there is latent the highest possibility; one must follow it. If God does not wish it, then let Him prevent it, but one must not hinder oneself. Trusting to God I have dared, but I was not successful; in that is to be found peace, calm, a confidence in God. I have not dared; that is woeful thought, a torment in eternity." - Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
"My friend, there will come one day to you a Messenger, whom you cannot treat with contempt. He will say, “Come with me;” and all your pleas of business cares and earthly loves will be of no avail. When his cold hand touches yours, the key of the counting-room will drop forever, and he will lead you away from all your investments, your speculations, your bank-notes and real estate, and with him you will pass into eternity, up to the bar of God. You will not be too busy to die." - Abbott Elliot Kittredge
"Here are taught three doctrines which shall be taught here as the essence of Judaism: First, there is a God, one, indivisible, eternal, spiritual, most holy and most perfect. Second, there is an immortal life and man is a son of eternity. Thirdly, love thy fellow men without distinction of creed or race as thyself." - Alfred M. Lilienthal
"If there remains an eternity to us after the short revolution of time we so swiftly run over here, ‘tis clear that all the happiness that can be imagined in this fleeting state is not valuable in respect of the future." - John Locke
"What really is? That which is eternal: that is to say, what never had birth, nor will ever have an end; to which time never brings any change. For time is a mobile thing, which appears as in a shadow, together with matter, which is ever running and flowing, without ever remaining stable or permanent... Wherefore we must conclude that God is - not at all according to any measure of time, but according to an eternity immutable and immobile, not measured by time or subject to any decline." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"Duty reaches down the ages in its effects, and into eternity; and when the man goes about it resolutely, it seems to me now as though his footsteps were echoing beyond the stars, though only heard faintly in the atmosphere of this world." - William Mountford
"Eternity is the divine treasure-house and hope is the window, by means of which mortals are permitted to see, as through a glass darkly, the things which God is preparing." - William Mountford
"Time is change - on all sorts of different scales; and the phenomenal world is made up of this continual changing, at different rates, of everything, like an enormous clock full of wheels. Outside, there is this stream of becoming; and within, a stream of ever-changing thoughts and feelings, a succession of different I’s, of fragmentary bits of ourselves - an inner world of becoming in which nothing is, in which we possess nothing and do not possess ourselves. We think of all this changing in time as progress; and not only do we have this extraordinary and absurd illusion, but we imagine that the stability that we all secretly crave can be sought for in all this machinery of change, in the turning wheels of this enormous clock. But we know that what is stable was always beyond time... The real distinction, therefore, between time and eternity is qualitative and so must lie in the realm of psychological experience." - Maurice Nicoll
"To live unto eternity is to live unto aeon, unto unity, unto wholeness, completeness, unto the integration of all the life. And this is now. The enemy to now is the illusion of passing-time... When we reach the now the world is turned the other way round. We are at the centre of things. The responsibility is ours. Had we now in our lives we would cease to blame.... Universe evolves out of one’s own mind... because the WORLD is a series of possible mental transformations" - Maurice Nicoll
"We need to get rid of some false meanings that we give to the words eternal and eternity. The psychological idea connected with eternal life cannot be limited to the view that man is changed into another state at death, merely by the act of dying. It would be far more correct to say that it refers, first of all, to some change that man is capable of undergoing now, in this life, and one that is connected with the attainment of unity. The modern term psychology means literally the science of the soul. But in former times there actually existed a science of the soul based upon the idea that man is an imperfect state but capable of reaching a further state... No totality-act is possible; the will is separate from knowledge, the feeling from intellect." - Maurice Nicoll
"We are here because in this part of the universe time is trained to stop... Life cannot survive in time that flows, or while it flows. Life survives only when time stands still... So it could happen someplace, somehow, that eternity and time would meet at a golden intersection. At the very heart of the cross, where eternity and time would connect, time would stop to be blessed by eternity. And that, in fact, is our present. Consequently, the present is the very portion of time that has stopped. Life survives only in the present. The past, therefore, consists of moments during which time has previously stopped; the future, of moments during which time will subsequently stop. So here we are. We are here because in this part of the universe time stops and makes life possible. Perhaps we can imagine a time that is not lined up to intersect eternity, a time that would seem sterile to our way of thinking. In such a region of the universe, we would not be in a position to exist since our dominant features are those of life and death." - Milorad Pavić
"God is withdrawn from both ends of time, for his life is not Time, but Eternity, the archetype of time. And in Eternity there is no past and future, only present." - Philo, aka Philo of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, Yedidia, "Philon", and Philo the Jew NULL
"Is not time the image of Eternity because it effects the perfecting of earthly natures just as Eternity is the container and preserver of being?... Things which proceed from Eternity are not able to share in a stable perfection, whole and unchanging, are under the dominion of time." - Proclus, fully Proclus Lycaeus NULL
"Music is the heartbeat of the universe. It reaches into the outer ramparts of eternity where time and space are nonexistent; it touches the stars and is reflected in the beauty of the galaxy. It is exemplified in the mathematical precision found in the largest star and the tiniest molecule. Music is emotional. It touches the heart and creates a response within the listener without his being aware of the technique." - John Rossel
"There is in every man a certain feeling that he has been what he is from all eternity, and by no means become such in time." - Friedrich Schelling, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von
"Eternity gives nothing back of what one leaves out of minutes." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
"Serenity comes to the man who lives with an unfaltering faith in an unfailing God. The person who lives with eternity in his heart will find a strange calm in his spirit." - Joseph R. Sizoo
"Faith is a certain image of eternity. All things are present to it - things past, and things to come; it converses with angels, and antedates the hymns of glory. Every man that hath this grace is as certain there are glories for him, if he perseveres in duty, as if he had heard and sung thanksgiving song for the blessed sentence of doomsday." - Jeremy Taylor