Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Eternity

"The truth [is] that there is only one terminal dignity - love. And the story of a love is not important - what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted in eternity." - Helen Hayes

"The story of love is not important - what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity." - Helen Hayes

"Eternal life is not a life for the future. By charity we start eternity right here below." - Henri de Lubac

"The saint… is one who succeeds in giving us at least a glimpse of eternity, despite the thick opacity of time." - Henri de Lubac

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." -

"You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"You cannot kill time without injuring eternity." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"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 all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. 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 all the ages." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in every moment." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"As if you could kill time without injuring eternity." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"The eternity of the spirit does not begin after death, but is, like God, always present." -

"Viewed philosophically, music is time made aesthetically perceptible. As the present. And the identify of the present moment and eternity once again becomes apparent." -

"Temptation is a fearful word. It indicates the beginning of a possible series of infinite evils. It is the ringing of an alarm bell, whose melancholy sounds may reverberate through eternity. Like the sudden, sharp cry of “Fire!” under our windows by night, it should rouse us to instantaneous action, and brace every muscle to its highest tension." - Horace Mann

"Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is eternity! Everyman’s an angel!" - Allen Ginsberg, fully Irwin Allen Ginsberg

"If we seek the real source of the dance, if we go to nature, we find that the dance of the future is the dance of the past, the dance of eternity, and has been and will always be the same." - Isadora Duncan

"The moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last." - James Froude, fully James Anthony Froude

"There are times in the history of men and nations, when they stand so near the vale that separates mortals from the immortals, time from eternity, and men from their God, that they can almost hear the beatings, an feel the pulsations of the heart of the Infinite." - James A. Garfield

"In the spirit of faith let us begin each day, and we shall be sure to “redeem the time” which it brings to us, by changing it into something definite and eternal. There is a deep meaning n this phrase of the apostle, to redeem time. We redeem time, and do not merely use it. We transform it into eternity by living it aright." - James Freeman Clarke

"Time is Eternity begun." - James Montgomery

"A man is what he is, not what men say he is. His character no man can touch. His character is what he is before his God and his Judge; and only himself can damage that. His reputation is what men say he is. That can be damaged; but reputation is for time, character is for eternity." - John B. Gough

"Eternity is not an everlasting flux of Tyme; but Tyme is a short parenthesis in a longe period." - John Donne

"Our object in life should be to accumulate a great number of questions to be asked and resolved in eternity. Now we ask the sage, the genius, the philosopher, the divine, but none can tell; but we will open our queries to other respondents - we will ask angels, redeemed spirits, and God." - John Foster, fully John Watson Foster

"What a superlatively grand and consoling idea is that of death! Without this radiant idea - this delightful morning star, indicting that the luminary of eternity is going to rise, life would, to my view, darken into midnight melancholy. The expectation of living here, and living thus always, would be indeed a prospect of overwhelming despair. But thanks to that fatal decree that dooms us to die; thanks to that gospel which opens the vision of an endless life; and thanks above all to that Saviour friend who has promised to conduct the faithful through the sacred trance of death, into scenes of Paradise and everlasting delight." - John Foster, fully John Watson Foster

"[Repentance] The golden key that opens the palace of eternity." - John Milton

"The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the world, nor the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the world. And having done so, they can, whatever their generation, bring together into one scheme all individual perspectives and arrive together at regulative principles that can be affirmed by everyone as he lives by them, each from his own standpoint. Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view." - John Rawls, fully John Bordley Rawls

"‘Tis the divinity that stirs within us; ‘tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter, and intimates eternity to man." - Joseph Addison

"By anticipation we suffer misery and enjoy happiness before they are in being. We can set the sun and stars forward, or lose sight of them by wandering into those retired parts of eternity when the heavens and earth shall be no more." - Joseph Addison

"How can it enter into the thoughts of man, that the soul, which is capable of such immense perfections, and of receiving new improvements to all eternity, shall fall away into nothing almost as soon as it is created?" - Joseph Addison

"This longing after immortality? Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror, of falling into nought? Why shrinks the soul back on herself, and startles at destruction. ‘Tis the divinity that stirs within us; ‘tis heaven itself, that points out an hereafter, and intimates eternity to man." - Joseph Addison

"To look upon the soul as going on from strength to strength, to consider that she is to shine forever with new accessions of glory, and brighten to all eternity; that she will be still adding virtue to virtue, and knowledge to knowledge, carries in it something wonderfully agreeable to that ambition which is natural to the mind of man." - Joseph Addison

"The soul, considered with its Creator, is like one of those mathematical lines that may draw nearer to another for all eternity without a possibility of touching it; and can there be a thought so transporting as to consider ourselves in these perpetual approaches to Him, who is not only the standard of perfection, but of happiness?" - Joseph Addison

"'Tis the divinity that stirs within us; 'tis heaven itself that points out an hereafter, and intimates eternity to man. Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought!" - Joseph Addison

"`Tis the divinity that stirs within us; `tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter, and intimates eternity to man. Eternity! Thou pleasing, dreadful thought!" - Joseph Addison

"The "morphogenic" relationship of eternity to time is not to be thought of as sequential. Moreover, eternity being by definition outside or beyond temporality, transcendent of all categories, whether of virtue or of reason (being and nonbeing, unity and multiplicity, love and justice, forgiveness and wrath), the term and concept "God" is itself but a metaphor of the unknowing mind, connotative, not only beyond itself, but beyond thought... metaphors are equivalent as alternative signs of the high mystical experience of an absorption of mortal appearance in immortal being; for which another historical figure of speech is the "End of the World."" - Joseph Campbell

"“Time restores all things.” Wrong! Time restores many things, but eternity restores all." - Joseph Roux

"“What is your religion?” Bravely I stated, “I believe in God and I honor His prophets; I love virtue and I have faith in eternity.”" - Kahlil Gibran

"Love joins our present with the past and the future... Love is a divine knowledge that enables men to see as much as the gods... Love is a blinding mist that keeps the soul from discerning the secret of existence, so that the heart sees only trembling phantoms of desire among the hills, and hears only echoes of cries from voiceless valleys... Love is the rest of the body in the quiet of the grave, the tranquillity of the soul in the depth of Eternity... And so, all who passed spoke of Love as the image of their hopes and frustrations, leaving it a mystery as before." - Kahlil Gibran

"Marriage is the union of two divinities that a third might be born on earth. It is the union of two souls in a strong love for the abolishment of separateness. It is that higher unity which fuses the separate unites within the two spirits. It is the golden ring in a chain whose beginning is a glance, and whose ending is Eternity." - Kahlil Gibran

"Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror." - Kahlil Gibran

"Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity." - Kahlil Gibran

"The many-faceted thing called love succeeds in building bridges from the loneliness on this shore to the loneliness on the other one. These bridges can be of great beauty, but they are rarely built for eternity, and frequently they cannot tolerate too heavy a burden without collapsing." - Karen Horney, born Danielsen

"History is the display of the supposed advantages of power and intelligence which some men possess over others, of the struggle for existence hypocritically described by ideologists as the struggle for justice and freedom, of the ebb and flow of old and new forms of human righteousness, each vying with the rest in the solemnity and triviality... Yet one drop of eternity is of greater weight than a vast ocean of finite things." - Karl Barth

"We must understand that God is the measure of all reality and propriety, understand that eternity exists first and then time, and therefore the future first and then the present, as surely as the Creature exists first and then the creature." - Karl Barth

"Shall I say: Creator, Sustainer, Pardoner, Near One, Distant One, Incomprehensible One, God both of flowers and stars, God of the gentle wind and of terrible battles, Wisdom, Power, Loyalty and Truthfulness, Eternity and Infinity, you the All-Merciful, you the Just One, you Love itself?" - Karl Rahner

"All plants, animals, and men are already in eternity, traveling across the face of time. Whence we know not. Whither, who is able to say? Let us have one world at a time, and let us make the journey one of joy to our fellow passengers, and just as convenient and happy for them as we can, and trust the rest as we trust life." - Luther Burbank

"Physics has discovered the edge of infinity; the wisdom of the ages takes us across the border, which is nowhere but in us. When each person rejoins the stream of evolution that upholds the galaxies ands sweeps life forward on the wave of eternity, human existence will cease to contain any suffering, and our real purpose in living - to create heaven on earth - will be realized." - Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, born Mahesh Prasad Varma

"Life’s meaning rests in the eye of the beholder and in our constant desire to approach perfection. Life is so immense and complex that there is no one truth, only the rule of destiny... We do not choose life; life chooses us. Yet we try to follow our destiny, our passion our drive. We must live every minute as if it is our first and our last... The meaning of life lies in our desire to help others... Earthly life is an eternal miracle. In a moment of grace, we can grasp eternity in the palm of our hand." - Marcel Marceau, born Marcel Mangel

"Earthly life is an eternal miracle. In a moment of grace, we can grasp eternity in the palm of our hand. This is the gift given to creative individuals who can identify with the mysteries of life through art. It is a divine gift, this spirit of humanity. It is the fight for light over shadow." - Marcel Marceau, born Marcel Mangel