Quotes About Eternity

Time is as necessary for remembering as it is for forgetting. Even the smallest embrace of pain needs time larger than a pause; the greatest pause requires an eternity, the greatest hurt a lifetime. A lifetime is longer than eternity: an eternity can exist without human presence.

What is eternity? You're on the checkout line at a supermarket. There are seven people in front of you. They are all old. They all have two carts and coupons for every item. They are all paying by check. None of them have ID. It's the checkout girl's first day on the job. She doesn't speak any English. Take away fifteen minutes from that, and you begin to get an idea of what eternity is.

Fight for us, O God, that we not drift numb and blind and foolish into vain and empty excitements. Life is too short, too precious, too painful to waste on worldly bubbles that burst. Heaven is too great, hell is too horrible, eternity is too long that we should putter around on the porch of eternity.

The soul is created in a place between Time and Eternity: with its highest powers it touches Eternity, with its lower Time.

If we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event - and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.

It's almost is like God, in our case, gave us a shot of anesthesia, you know, to your body and to your heart in a way, that you can survive. That you're - there's enough of a numbness, you're very much alive and very aware of eternity, I mean, Heaven and the real world there. I talk a lot about how Heaven's never been more clear to me. I've never been more sure that we are made for eternity.

Only those return to Eternity Who on earth seek out Eternity.

Since eternity means happiness for you, what does it matter if some of these passing moments are unpleasant?

Obedience to the law of chastity will increase our happiness in mortality and make possible our progress in eternity.

When you are in pain, a moment is an eternity.

Rest, rest, shall I have not all eternity to rest.

If you live to be 100 years old, what you've done here for the last two days, weeks, monthswhat you've done here will echo in eternity.

All things from eternity are of like forms and come round in circle.

I am a moment illuminating eternity....I am affirmation...I am ecstasy.

A life of mere pleasure! A little while, in the spring-time of the senses, in the sunshine of prosperity, in the jubilee of health, it may seem well enough. But how insufficient, how mean, how terrible when age comes, and sorrow, and death! A life of pleasure! What does it look like when these great changes beat against it--when the realities of eternity stream in? It looks like the fragments of a feast, when the sun shines upon the withered garlands, and the tinsel, and the overturned tables, and the dead lees of wine.

The truth of the matter is, we all come to prayer with a tangled mass of motives altruistic and selfish, merciful and hateful, loving and bitter. Frankly, this side of eternity we will never unravel the good from the bad, the pure from the impure. God is big enough to receive us with all our mixture.

Our existence as embodied beings is purely momentary; what are a hundred years in eternity? But if we shatter the chains of egotism, and melt into the ocean of humanity, we share its dignity. To feel that we are something is to set up a barrier between God and ourselves; to cease feeling that we are something, is to become one with God.

Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.

The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man.

Death, my son, is a good thing for all men; it is the night for this worried day that we call life. It is in the sleep of death that finds rest for eternity the sickness, pain, desperation, and the fears that agitate, without end, we unhappy living souls.

Eternity: what a waste of time.

We who follow Christ are men and women of eternity. We must put no confidence in the passing scenes of the disappearing world. We must resist every attempt of Satan to palm off upon us the values that belong to mortality. Nothing less than forever is long enough for us.

We live in an age when there is a false glare on the things of time and a great mist over the things of eternity.

there won't be any pain, he promised. Only an eternity together. Come back to me. (Stanton, book #5)

Music, being identical with heaven, isn't a thing of momentary thrills, or even hourly ones. It's a condition of eternity.

A good man ("un homme de bien", Fr.) never wholly perishes, the best part of his being outlives (or survives) in eternity.

To stand before the Holy One of eternity is to change. Resentments cannot be held with the same tenacity when we enter his gracious light.

Look within. The heart is the foundation of virtue; and it is for eternity ready to do virtuous works.

All eternity is in the moment.

God looked through eternity past and He saw you and He chose to reach out and redeem you by His own grace. It's hard to imagine that kind of love.

Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves And Immortality. We slowly drove, he knew no haste, And I had put away My labour, and my leisure too, For his civility. We passed the school where children played, Their lessons scarcely done; We passed the fields of gazing grain, We passed the setting sun. We paused before a house that seemed A swelling of the ground; The roof was scarcely visible, The cornice but a mound. Since then 'tis centuries; but each Feels shorter than the day I first surmised the horses' heads Were toward eternity.

I wrote a one-act play - I can't remember the name of it, but it was really about the way women are perceived as leaders. In the play, Catherine the Great would say things like, "You know, John F. Kennedy had extramarital affairs and no one says anything. But I bang one horse and now I'm a horse banger for all eternity? That's it? That's what I am?"

Future contingents cannot be certain to us, because we know them as such. They can be certain only to God whose understanding is in eternity above time. Just as a man going along a road does not see those who come after him; but the man who sees the whole road from a height sees all those who are going along the road at the same time.

It is important for those of us who are Christian to remember that our physical lives don't last forever. Our souls will last an eternity, and thus we should place even more emphasis on the health of our souls than the health of our bodies.

She had spent all her life in feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone save her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul. My enormous and morose Mademoiselle is all right on earth but impossible in eternity.

Man doesnt have the patience or the power to wait. But God does. He has all eternity to accomplish His purposes.

If you wish to enrich days, plant flowers; If you wish to enrich years, plant trees; If you wish to enrich Eternity, plant ideals in the lives of others.

Everything that is not eternal is worthless in eternity.

Past and future exist only in our memory. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity.

A moment or an eternity—did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.

Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Time's swiftness Which is the swiftest of all things, all were eternal torment.

I love looking at you, hundred-year-old tree, loaded with shoots and boughs as though you were a stripling. Teach me the secret of growing old like you, open to life, to youth, to dreams, as somebody aware that youth and age are merely steps towards eternity.

It is so pleasant to learn about new things. Every day I find how little I know, but I do not feel discouraged since God has given me an eternity in which to learn more.

...knowing that to be a librarian was to come as close as any human being can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity's engine.

Thus understanding and love, that is, the knowledge of and delight in the truth, are, as it were, the two arms of the soul, with which it embraces and comprehends with all the saints the length and breath, the height and depth, that is the eternity, the love, the goodness, and the wisdom of God.

Why does an apple fall when it is ripe? Is it brought down by the force of gravity? Is it because its stalk withers? Because it is dried by the sun, because it grows too heavy, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it? None of these is the cause.... Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own freewill is in the historical sense not free at all but is bound up with the whole course of history and preordained from all eternity.

Nobody could stand an eternity of Heaven.

Life is just a schoolroom with a glorious opportunity to prepare us for eternity.