William Blake - Baruch Spinoza - Percy Bysshe Shelley - Marcus Aurelius - Muhammad Ali - Jean-Paul Sartre - Jack Kerouac - William Shakespeare - Lord Byron - Tom Stoppard - William Congreve - Richard Dawkins - John Milton - Emanuel Swedenborg - Agatha Christie - Jerry Falwell - Edvard Munch - Fyodor Dostoyevski - Gaustave Flaubert - Graham Greene - T S Eliot - George Bernard Shaw - Friedrich Nietzsche - James Joyce -
To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour. William Blake
Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Time’s swiftness
Which is the swiftest of all things, all were eternal torment. William Blake, Milton
Eternity is in love with the productions of time. William Blake
God and all attributes of God are eternal. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, 1677
The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains which is eternal ... We feel and know by experience that we are eternal. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics V:23
The one remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shine, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonis st52, 1821
What we do in life ripples in eternity. Marcus Aurelius, A.D. 121-180
The most important thing about life is what’s going to happen when you die. Are you going to go to Heaven or Hell? And there’s eternity: how long is eternity? Muhammad Ali, interview Reg Gutteridge, film When Ali Came to Newcastle
Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal. Jean-Paul Sartre
Listen closely... the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on. This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it. Jack Kerouac
I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born. Jack Kerouac, The Portable Jack Kerouac
Thou know’st ’tis common – all that lives must die,
Passing though nature to eternity. William Shakespeare, Hamlet I ii 72-73, Queen to Hamlet
Time’s thievish progress to eternity. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 77
Dark-heaving; – boundless, endless, and sublime – The image of eternity. Lord Byron
Eternity’s a terribly thought. I mean, where’s it all going to end? Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, 1967
Eternity was in that moment. William Congreve, 1670-1729
Eternity would be awful. Professor Richard Dawkins, Five Minutes with Richard Dawkins
Yet some there be that by due steps aspire
To lay their just hands on that golden key
That opes the palace of eternity. John Milton, Comus, 1637
That every man after the life in the world lives to eternity, is evident from this, that man is then spiritual, and no longer natural, and that the spiritual man, separated from the natural, remains such as he is to eternity, for man’s state cannot be changed after death. Emanuel Swedenborg
Everything that has existed, lingers in the Eternity. Agatha Christie
I think Hell’s a real place where real people spend a real eternity. Jerry Falwell
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them, and that is eternity. Edvard Munch
We’re always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is. Sometimes, you know, I can’t help feeling that that’s what it is. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
And she felt as though she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. For an infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time. Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
A thousand years ago five minutes were
Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.
Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and
Infinite aftertime: above your head
They close like giant wings, and you are dead. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
If time and space, as sages say,
Are things which cannot be,
The sun which does not feel decay
No greater is than we.
So why, Love, should we ever pray
To live a century?
The butterfly that lives a day
Has lived eternity. T S Eliot, A Lyric
Nobody could stand an eternity of Heaven. George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there, whether we know it or not. Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms
Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same House of Being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity. Friedrich Nietzsche
Eternity is really long, especially near the end. Woody Allen
Last and crowning torture of all the tortures of that awful place is the eternity of hell. Eternity! O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it! And remember, it is an eternity of pain. Even though the pains of hell were not so terrible as they are, yet they would become infinite, as they were destined to last for ever ... To bear even the sting of an insect for all eternity would be a dread torment. What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell for ever? For ever! For all eternity! James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man