quotations about eternity
The problem is, eternity is barred to humans, and so humans, all too painfully aware of that and entertaining little hope of appealing against that verdict of fate, seek to stifle and deafen their tragic wisdom in a hubbub of frail and fleeting pleasures. This admittedly being a false calculation--for the same reason which prompted it (that tragic wisdom can never be chased or conjured away for good)--they condemn themselves, whatever their material wealth, to perpetual spiritual poverty: to continuous unhappiness.... Instead of seeking the way to happiness within the limits of their predicament, they take a long detour, hoping that somewhere along the route their odious and repulsive destiny may be escaped or fooled--only to land back in the despair that prompted them to start on their voyage of (dearly wished for, yet unattainable) discovery. The only discovery humans can possibly make on that voyage is that the route they have taken was but a detour that sooner or later will bring them back to the starting line.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
The Art of Life
The best way to deal with eternity is by living it one day at a time.
ALYSON NOËL
Evermore
Eternity! thou pleasing dreadful thought! Through what variety of untried being, through what new scenes and changes must we pass!
JOSEPH ADDISON
Cato
Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been all carried away, and if the bird came again and carried it all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as their are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves upon the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain real dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun.
JAMES JOYCE
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Dhalgren
He that will often put eternity and the world before him, and who will dare to look steadfastly at both of them, will find that the more he contemplates them, the former will grow greater and the latter less.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon: Or
In the sight of eternity
I realize my present state
A leaf in the storm of time
Drifting to the final gate
GOLDEN DAWN
"Sub Specie Aeternitatis", The Art of Dreaming
For me eternity is nothing
But a short while
IRON MAIDEN
"If Eternity Should Fail", Book of Souls
This day is not a sieve, losing time. With each passing minute, each passing year, there's this deepening awareness that I am filling, gaining time. We stand on the brink of eternity.
ANN VOSKAMP
One Thousand Gifts
The sum total of all sums total is eternal.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
Forever is composed of Nows--
'Tis not a different time--
Except for Infiniteness--
And Latitude of Home--
EMILY DICKINSON
"Forever is composed of Nows"
This speck of life in time's great wilderness
This narrow isthmus 'twixt two boundless seas,
The past, the future, two eternities!
THOMAS MOORE
Lalla Rookh
Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair