"Eternity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and attractive title, Ethics of Atheism. The great offense of the scientific (sciolistic) atheist is his lofty arrogance. He complacently assumes the name of Infallible Wisdom. He "understands all mysteries;" his mental telescope sweeps eternity "from everlasting to everlasting;" his microscopic vision pierces the secrets of creation,—sees the beauty and order of all celestial worlds emerge from fiery chaotic dust,—by the fortunate contact of cooling cinders of ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... God and Father, that we come to mean infinitely more to ourselves. "If," writes a modern essayist, "a man feels that his life is spent in expedients for killing time, he finds it hard to suppose that he can go on forever trying to kill eternity. It is when he thinks on the littleness that makes up his day, on the poor trifles he cares for—his pipe, his dinner, his ease, his gains, his newspaper—that he feels so cramped and cribbed, cabined and confined, that he loses the power of conceiving anything vast or sublime—immortality ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... his own powers. He would have given much to have had Father Paul at this bedside for one brief hour, the more so as he saw the shrinking and terror creeping over the drawn, ashen face. Did his guilty soul know itself to be standing on the verge of eternity? and did the wretched man feel the horror of great darkness ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... man," continues he, "and may be shot dead, I command you and all to take care of Fritz (FUR FRITZ ZU SORGEN), as God shall reward you. And I give you all, Wife to begin with, my curse (MEINEN PLUCH), that God may punish you in Time and Eternity, if you do not, after my death,—do what, O Heavens?—bury me in the vault of the Schlosskirche," Palace-Church at Berlin! "And you shall make no grand to-do (KEIN FESTIN) on the occasion. On your body and life, no festivals and ceremonials, except that the regiments one after the other fire ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... ends with Olivet. Though the Saviour lived before his incarnation, and continues to live after his ascension, yet it gives a certain definiteness of impression to limit one's view to his historic career, distinguishing his visible life lived in time from his invisible life lived in eternity. ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... climb out there and, instinctively treading lightly on your tiptoes and breathing in syncopated breaths, you steal across the ledge, going slowly and carefully until you pause finally upon the very eyelashes of eternity and look down into that great ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... It didn't seem possible that when a few minutes ago he didn't know whether she was dead or alive, that he could now seat himself here and hope to hear her voice. His hand trembled as he took down the receiver. It seemed an eternity before he got central; another before she connected him with Belmont. He grew irritable with impatience over the length of time ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... system of divine revelation is obvious at first sight. It contains a complete code of practical rules for the regulation of life—rules that have a divine breadth and fulness, and can make men wise not for time alone, but also for eternity. The principles embodied in them admit of endlessly varied applications, so that the study of a life cannot exhaust them. The more they are pondered, and prayed over, and reduced to practice, the more are their hidden treasures of wisdom brought to light. Solomon lived himself in the ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... doing some rapid thinking. If Sumbay bridge was destroyed and the fact not known in Arequipa, the government troops would come along and, with the engine crew, be hurled into eternity. The bridge being about one hundred and seventy-five feet high and six hundred feet long and on a curve with deep cuts on either side and a heavy down grade, it would be impossible for any train to stop, unless ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... gloves, and crape bands on their hats. Everything was artificial and painfully forlorn; and the want of genuineness, which surrounded the pale sleeper, seemed to cast suspicion on the honesty and validity of her late-formed hope for eternity. ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... sermon, which was no sermon at all. True, I took a text, Isa. lxiii. 1, and I had a sermon in my mind. But when I looked round at those men, and thought how we were all standing on the very brink of eternity, and how few, perhaps, would ever see the dawn of another Easter morn, I knew it was not the place for an elaborate sermon. The time was precious and my words must be few and straight. I had a good ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... servant who dusts the scholar's library the closed volumes are meaningless; they do not even appear to contain a promise unless he also is a scholar, not merely a servant. It is possible to gaze throughout eternity upon a shut exterior from sheer indolence,—mental indolence, which is incredulity, and which at last men learn to pride themselves on; they call it scepticism, and talk of the reign of reason. It is no more a state to justify pride than that of the Eastern sybarite who will not ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... unlicensed piece—"The Isle of Pines." A fine of five pounds was imposed upon him, as effectual in suppressing him as though it had been one of five thousand pounds. He could now turn with relish to two books then on his press, "Meditations on Death and Eternity" and the "Righteous Man's Evidence for Heaven;" for Massachusetts Bay, with its then powerful rule of divinity without religion, or religion without mercy, held out small hope of his meeting such a fine within the expedition of his natural life. But ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... in the midst of a great light, One reflex from eternity on time, One mighty countenance of perfect calm, Awful with most ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... they might have suffered persecution in their own land and sought our doorless entrances of hospitality; she still realised her own aloofness from them, or rather theirs from her. They had entered existence entirely outside her chalk-line. She and they walked on parallels which to all eternity ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... me, and as you love your mothers, wives, daughters, go back with me, leaving prejudice behind, and listen dispassionately to my most melancholy story. The river of death rolls so close to my weary feet, that I speak as one on the brink of eternity; and as I hope to meet my God in peace, I shall tell you the truth. Sometimes it almost shakes our faith in God's justice, when we suffer terrible consequences, solely because we did our duty; and it seems to me bitterly hard, inscrutable, that ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... stir; to carry its pure passion forth into the dark places, to cherish and dream it over again.... Banneker sat before the broad fireplace in the laxity of a still grief. Io was going away from him. For a six-month. For a year. For an eternity. Going away from him, bearing his whole heart with her, as she had left him after the night on the river, left him to the searing memory of that mad, sweet cleavage of her lips to his, the passionate offer of her awakened womanhood in uttermost surrender ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... The Veda is thus formally acknowledged to have the same authority as the evidence of the senses. With this is generally coupled the doctrine that it is eternal. It was not composed by human authors, but is a body of sound existing from eternity as part of Brahman and breathed out by him when he causes the whole creation to evolve at the beginning of a world period. The reputed authors are simply those who have, in Indian language, seen portions of this self-existent teaching. This doctrine sounds more ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... All eternity seemed poised and waiting for the second when one of the men would make the move for his gun. Not a breath was drawn in the room. Hands remained frozen in air in the midst of a gesture. Lips which ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... then of this hour, This sad, sad hour for you and me; We did not dream there was a power Could force us for eternity To say ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... fragrant should he this way pass; His calm love is a chain that binds me fast.... Yet often melancholy will forecast That time when I shall have grown old—when he— Still rapturous in his struggle with life's blast— Shall give a pitying side glance to me, Who skirt the fog-fringe of eternity, Straining mine eyes to catch what shadowy sign Of good or evil omen there may be, Yet no sure good nor evil can divine: Only some hints of doubtful sound and light, That ...
— Songs, Sonnets & Miscellaneous Poems • Thomas Runciman
... Priesthood upon their wedded state, these people believe implicitly in the perpetuity of that relationship on the far side of the grave. They marry not with the saddening limitation "Until death do you part," but "For time and for all eternity."[3] This constitutes celestial marriage. The thought that plural marriage has ever been the head and front of "Mormon" offending, that to it is traceable as the true cause the hatred of other sects and the unpopularity ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage
... that they had been saying it in monotonous rhythm ever since he started—that they would go on saying it through eternity. ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... symbolizes Eternity and Space, and the filling or plan is the symbol of the world—beautiful, but ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... Why so then? Had He no might to turn and change the whole, so that no evil should remain in it, seeing He is All-mighty? Lastly, why would He make any thing at all of it, and not rather by the same All-mightiness cause it not to be at all? Or, could it then be against His will? Or if it were from eternity, why suffered He it so to be for infinite spaces of times past, and was pleased so long after to make something out of it? Or if He were suddenly pleased now to effect somewhat, this rather should the All-mighty ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... dark eternity, To you has come the children's cry, Send up from hell, fulfil your aid To ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... his world sink away from his feet. In those cruel words he heard the murmur of the centuries breaking upon the shore of eternity. He heard the voice of doom; it said, in cold, mechanical, and measured tones: "Ready, aim, fire!" and he felt the bullets tear his heart to shreds. He heard the sound of the earth upon his coffin and (if the good God was so merciful) the song of a bird above his forgotten ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... suddenly a great column of smoke and fire rolled up from the grove, and in the same second came piercing shrieks in Elspie's voice. The grove was only a few rods away, but it seemed to Donald an eternity before he reached the spot, to see not only the spruce boughs and flax on fire, but Elspie tossing up her arms like one crazed, her gown all ablaze. The brave, foolish girl, at the first blazing of the stalks ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... thought proper to use it as an illustration of the connection between heaven and earth, thus: "When the sulphuric acid of genuine attrition corrodes the contaminating zinc of innate degeneracy and actual sinfulness, and the fervent electrical force of prayerful eternity ascends up to the residence of the Eternal Supreme One, you may calculate on unfailing and immediate despatch ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... am I not justified in mourning his death, seeing that he wrote thus concerning me? He gave me what he could, he would have given more had he been able. And yet what greater gift can one man give another than by handing down his name and fame to all eternity. I hear you say that Martial's verses will not live to all eternity? You may be right; at any rate, he hoped for their immortality when he wrote them' ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... usual life, and to places that he knew, he was unable to consider; but he was back in those places by some means, and with this condemnation upon him, that he was never, in this world or the next, through all the unimaginable ages of eternity, to look on Rachael's face or hear her voice. Wandering to and fro, unceasingly, without hope, and in search of he knew not what (he only knew that he was doomed to seek it), he was the subject of a nameless, horrible dread, a mortal fear of one particular shape ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... powers and developing the virtue of the soul, prepare it for 'the earnest of our inheritance.' Hence it is that every man has his burden. Brethren, if you believe that God is good, yea, but as tender as a human father, you will know that your troubles in life are a proof that you are reared for an eternity. But each man thinks his own burden the hardest to bear: the poor-man groans under his poverty, the rich man under the cares that multiply with wealth. For so far from wealth freeing us from trouble, all the wise men who have written in all ages have repeated, with ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of thought through which he passed as he crossed and recrossed the street and was back in the tiny room where life waited on death. It was another eternity while the doctor worked again over the boy. But at last he stood back, shaking his head and blinking the tears from ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... on another, preaching among the mountebanks at Moorfields; on a third, attracting around his pulpit ten thousand of the spectators at a race course; on a fourth, standing beside the gallows at an execution to speak of death and of eternity. Wesley, when excluded from the pulpit of Epworth, delivered some of his most impressive sermons in the churchyard, standing on his father's tomb. Howell Harris, the apostle of Wales, encountering a party of mountebanks, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... from which there was no appeal? Why is the classical reign to endure? Why is yonder simpering Venus de' Medicis to be our standard of beauty, or the Greek tragedies to bound our notions of the sublime? There was no reason why Agamemnon should set the fashions, and remain [Greek text omitted] to eternity: and there is a classical quotation, which you may have occasionally heard, beginning Vixere fortes, &c., which, as it avers that there were a great number of stout fellows before Agamemnon, may not unreasonably induce us to conclude that similar heroes were to succeed him. Shakspeare ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... as if I had drifted miles above the earth, through all space and eternity, and there was naught between me and high heaven but that white face. Ah, how I loved her! I knew it—I never doubted it. Could years of passionate adoration touch her heart—her little heart, now beating so ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... universe, so far as made up of matter, are in the nature of transformations of this eternal substance. But we doubt whether any physical philosopher of the present day would be satisfied to accept any demonstration of the eternity of matter. All he would admit is that, so far as his observation goes, no change in the quantity of matter can be produced by the action of any known cause. It seems to be equally uncreatable and indestructible. ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... going to eternity at such short notice and under such doubtful protection was not pleasing to Miss Trevor, and she shrank back from the thronging dangers ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... me, the idea of the marriage state seems to me, hardly less weightily oppressive than the idea of eternity. ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... their laws and elect their magistrates, is now inclosed for the cultivation of pot-herbs, or thrown open for the reception of swine and buffaloes. The public and private edifices that were founded for eternity lie prostrate, naked, and broken, like the limbs of a mighty giant; and the ruin is the more visible, from the stupendous relics that have survived the injuries of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... my child, that the wisest of us knows: but there is a whole eternity before us, every one, to grow wise in. Some," and she looked towards Oddo, "may outgrow their mistakes here; and others," looking at old Peder, "are travelling fast towards a place where everybody is wiser ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau
... has been revealed to man:—that the heaven and the earth were not self-existent from all eternity, but were in their first beginning created by God. As the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews expresses it: "Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... again, and Westray's heart stood still; till after a second that seemed an eternity Lord Blandamer took the papers with a short "I thank you," and walked a little way further, to the end of the gallery. The architect leant against the side of a window opposite which he found himself, and, looking out without seeing anything, presently heard Lord Blandamer tell a servant that Mr ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... of ideals; and they gave of their blood and their brawn and all earthly possessions for those ideals; and it is of such stuff that the spirit of dauntless nationhood is made. Men who build temples of their lives for ideals do not cement national mortar with graft. They build with integrity for eternity, not time. Their consciousness of an ideal gives them a poise, a concentration, a stability, a steadiness of purpose, unknown to mad chasers after wealth. Obstinate, dogged, perhaps tinged with the self-superior spirit of "I am holier than thou"—they ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... may the heart be as light When memory supplanteth the dream; When the sun has gone down may the sunbeam remain, And life's roses, though dead, all their fragrance retain, Till they catch at Eternity's gleam. ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... would take it hard—her leaving of me thus, as I made sure, for all eternity; and I did take it hard. For when the strain was off, and there was no one by to see or hear save my good-hearted death-watch, I must needs go down upon my knees beside the bed in childish weakness, and sob and choke and let the hot tears come as I had not since ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... would be unable to pass. Cicero (bk. vi. "Commonwealth," quoted by Inman) says: "Be assured that, for all those who have in any way conducted to the preservation, defence, and enlargement of their native country, there is a certain place in heaven, where they shall enjoy an eternity and happiness." It is needless to further multiply quotations in order to show that our latest development of these Eastern creeds only reiterated the teaching of the ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... And oh! little white English rose of my heart, I'd never ask more than you could give. Love isn't all passion. It's tenderness and shielding and service, dear, as well as fire and flame. A man loves his wife in all the little ways of daily life as well as in the big ways of eternity." ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... little know in what a company you will begin the march! You little know in what a happy moment for yourselves you partook of my cream tarts! I am only a unit, but I am a unit in an army. I know Death's private door. I am one of his familiars, and can show you into eternity without ceremony and yet ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dazzling. She did not understand about the ship. Time moved forward, or stood still. For her the night was timeless. It was eternity. ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... my mind was now so turned, that it lay like a horse leech at the vein, still crying out, Give, give (Prov 30:15); yea, it was so fixed on eternity, and on the things about the kingdom of heaven, that is, so far as I knew, though as yet, God knows, I knew but little; that neither pleasures, nor profits, nor persuasions, nor threats, could loosen it, or make it let go his hold; and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... millions of creatures, far nobler than we, to whom He might have given the joy of life, He has chosen to select us; to think that He has allotted to us a short period of existence here below, during which it is our privilege to be able to merit and draw near to Him for eternity; and that after this, our little time of trial, we are to reign with Him in everlasting glory! Of a certainty we are a favored people and a royal race, for we belong to God. He has purchased our souls by creating us, He has come down from Heaven to redeem and buy us back from ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... an eternity, there was a flicker, as when the wick of a lamp is lighted, and then a steady glow as the chimney was put on again. That glow brightened, decreased, became an unchanging light. The wick had been trimmed, and Cartwright was in for ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... hatred of skepticism. . . A good common-sense religion should be taken for granted and no questions asked. . . With Shakspere, or Sir Thomas Browne, or Jeremy Taylor, or Milton, man is contemplated in his relations to the universe; he is in presence of eternity and infinity; life is a brief drama; heaven and hell are behind the veil of phenomena; at every step our friends vanish into the abyss of ever present mystery. To all such thoughts the writers of the eighteenth century seemed to close their eyes ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... powers and passions which are slumbering there; to think that this feeble nursling has heaven or hell before it; that an immortal in a mortal form is allied to angels; that the life which it has begun shall last when the sun is quenched, enduring throughout all eternity. Much more wonderful the spectacle the manger offers, where shepherds bend their knees, and angels bend their eyes! Here is present, not the immortal, but the eternal; here is not one kind of matter united to another, or a spiritual to an earthly element, but the Creator to a creature, ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... shelter, for those hours of happiness thou hast seen me enjoy; I will love thee even for the suffering thou hast seen me endure. Neither happiness nor suffering came from thee; but thou hast been the scene for them. Descend again then, in peace, into eternity, and be blest, thou who hast left me experience in the place of youth, sweet memories instead of past time, and gratitude ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... pleasure, and all at once? Do not divers wills distract the mind, while he deliberates which he should rather choose? yet are they all good, and are at variance till one be chosen, whither the one entire will may be borne, which before was divided into many. Thus also, when, above, eternity delights us, and the pleasure of temporal good holds us down below, it is the same soul which willeth not this or that with an entire will; and therefore is rent asunder with grievous perplexities, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... world." The men who wrote that struggled to interpret His death by every possible phase of its meaning. In our time we have come to see that the aim of Christ and Christianity is to develop character and that this must be gained in time that we may be ready for eternity. Thus the death of Christ as the ultimate of self-sacrifice persuades us to the death of sin in us that we may live renewed in God; "rise from our dead selves to higher things." His life persuades us as the condition and example ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell
... silence presently engulfed the whole world. At last Doris opened her eyes—or had they been open during the eternity when nothing had occurred? She glanced at the clock, a trivial thing against the carving of the wall, but upon whose face Truth sat faithfully. Two hours had passed since she ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... Carlyle as "the youngest born of Eternity, child and heir of all the past times, with their good and evil, and parent of all the future with new questions and significance," on the right or wrong understanding of which depend the issues of life or death to us all, the sphinx riddle given to all ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of water.' From fading plantations he carries his thoughts to the paradise of God, where, in immortal youth and beauty, grows the tree of life, whose tree never withers, and which bears its fruit through the unnumbered ages of eternity. Earthly cities and palaces cause him to remember thee, O thou holy city, heavenly Jerusalem, whose walls are salvation, and thy gates praise, and the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple in the midst of thee! He who sees the world in this light ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 481, March 19, 1831 • Various
... the thought of his time influences the thought of all the time that follows. And he has made his impress upon eternity. ...
— The Mintage • Elbert Hubbard
... world has neither beginning in time, nor limit in space, but in both regards is infinite. Proof. The world must have existed from eternity, or it could never exist at all. If we imagine it had a beginning, we must imagine an anterior time when nothing was. But in such time the origin of anything is impossible. At no moment could any cause for ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... own I have no very clear notion annexed to them. But what say you to this? Do you not make the existence of sensible things consist in their being in a mind? And were not all things eternally in the mind of God? Did they not therefore exist from all eternity, according to you? And how could that which was eternal be created in time? Can anything be clearer ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... light free love of an exquisite caprice. Those little flowers that bloom and wither in the blush of dawn are for the little butterflies. The love that endures, give me that. And it must be of the deepest divine strain,—as deep and divine as maternal love. Man is of Eternity, not of Time; and love, the highest attribute of man, must be likewise. With me it must endure throughout all worlds and immensities; else I would not raise a finger for it. Pleasure, Shakib, is for the child within us; sexual joy, for the animal; love, for the god. ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... revenge!" laughed the land baron. "He made life a hell for her and she gave him an eternity of it. But take a little of this white wine, man. We've drunk to the roses of desire, and now should drink to the sanctified lilies. Her neck, Scroggs, is like a lily, and her hand and her brow! Beneath that whiteness, her eyes ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... execution of Burroughs and Proctor; his confident and eager endorsement, as related by Sewall, of the sentences of the Court, at the moment when all others were impressed with silent solemnity, by the spectacle of five persons, professing their innocency, just launched into eternity; his efforts to prolong the prosecutions, in preparing the book containing the trials of the "Malefactors" who had suffered; and his zeal, on all occasions, to "vindicate the Court" and applaud the Judges; all conspired in making it the belief of the whole people that he was, pre-eminently, ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... years had passed, and Hilda was now older than that mature woman was then; and yet she could not feel adult, though her childhood gleamed dimly afar off, and though the intervening expanse of ten years stretched out like a hundred years, like eternity. She was in trouble; the trouble grew daily more and more tragic; and the trouble was that she wanted she knew not what. If her mother had said to her squarely, "Tell me what it is will make you a bit more contented, and you shall have it even if it kills me!" Hilda could only ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... had come at last over a wait that seemed an eternity to the impatient girls. The long school-day was endless and, in spite of all good resolutions, they could not keep their thoughts from wandering to the alluring picture they had conjured up. A picture wherein figured an open-grate ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... circle of eternity We see in part; Our spirits are his breath, our hearts Beat from his heart; Hence we have played as little gods ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... doctrine in a new phraseology:—"Before Abraham was, I am, is the saying of Christ; yet it is true in some sense, if I say it of myself; for I was not only before myself, but Adam, that is, in the idea of God, and the decree of that Synod held from all eternity. And in this sense, I say, the World was before the Creation, and at an end before it had a beginning; and thus was I dead before I was alive; though my grave be England, my dying place was Paradise; and Eve miscarried of me before she ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... an hour that had given Lynde some general idea of eternity, the door was hastily thrown open, and a small, elderly, blue- eyed gentleman, followed by a man of gigantic stature, ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... worthies who are a 'thrifle late on him.' Finally they come down the hill, and he paces up and down the station ringing the bell and uttering the warning cry, "This thrain never shtops! This thrain never shtops! This thrain never shtops!"—giving one the idea that eternity, instead of Killarney, must be the final destination of the passengers. The clock in the Ballyfuchsia telegraph and post office ceases to go for twenty-four hours at a time, and nobody heeds it, while the postman always has a few moments' leisure to lay down his knapsack ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... succeeded, near the solemn river, stealing away by night, as all things steal away, by night and by day, so quietly yielding to the attraction of the loadstone rock of Eternity; and the nearer they drew to the chamber where Eugene lay, the more they feared that they might find his wanderings done. At last they saw its dim light shining out, and it gave them hope: though Lightwood faltered as he thought: 'If ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... tone of eager anxiety, "remember that I have trusted you. My secret is in your hands. You will be silent, I know; silent as death, or eternity.—That is, as both are ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... I, slowly; "many thousands of pounds' worth of human property destroyed, months of human labour and ingenuity wasted, and hundreds of young lives sacrificed, to say nothing of relatives bereaved and souls sent into eternity before their time—truly, if that is glory, it has ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... will was seen when the little Master's step resounded anew on the stairs, and his brown shrivelled hand shook the lock of the door. On the other hand, Sintram ceased not to say within himself, "We are lost, if he come back! We are lost to all eternity, if he come back!" And he fell on his knees, and prayed fervently from his troubled heart to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Then the little Master left the door, and again Biorn willed him to return, and again Sintram's prayers drove him away. So went on this strife of wills throughout the ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... Texas his face never more will see, But I hope he will meet his loved ones beyond in eternity. I hope he will meet his parents, will meet them face to face, And that they will grasp him by the right hand at the shining throne ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... consciousness of that solemn eternity, and let your eyes be ever directed to it, like a man who sees some great flush of light on the horizon, and is ever turning from his work to look. Use the transient as preparation for the eternal, the fleeting ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... upon?" This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonization, Church, Court and Commerce, as with so many flowers and wild ornaments grave and gay. I will not make more account of them. I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain and the Islands,—the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras, in my ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... tended toward making them irritable and cross, but on this day all such trifles passed over their heads unnoticed. For had they not between them done a marvelous thing? To save one life—to have brought back from eternity one little soul—was there not joy enough in that to last them all their days? The girls ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope
... severest moral discipline, which has as its object our eternal health. Though we shrink from the sorrow, though we writhe under the pain, though our hearts break a thousand times, He will not waver in His calm, steadfast purpose. He sees eternity; the present is as nothing to Him. He will break our grasp from all earthly idols, even though He tear our bleeding hearts asunder. If we are trusting in aught save Him, that upon which we are leaning will be snatched away, even though we fall at first into the depths ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... mild-looking man in a sort of clerical undress, "respect the day better than to talk thus of what lies beyond. Were you to die this hour, or what is more probable, be hung next week at Tower-wharf, you know not what might become, in eternity, of yourself." ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... moments which really matter in a life, which mark an epoch or destroy a dream, pass as a rule so quietly that only those whose dreams are shattered, or whose lives have been touched with the glory of the immortal, know that for a brief instant Time has become interchangeable with Eternity; that in the space of sixty fleeting seconds whole cycles of life have been lived through, and a vast and yawning gulf, in thought, in feeling, in spiritual growth or mental outlook, has opened to divide this moment from the ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... that she mustn't scream, whatever happened, experienced an instant of shuddering suspense, then an instantaneous eternity wherein, paradoxically, part of her seemed still to be clinging to the window-ledge while most of her was spinning giddily down through a bottomless pit, saw the grinning moon reel dizzily in the blue vault ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... gently, as he caressed the head bowed upon his breast, "let us begin right. For us two there is no North or South. We are one for time, and I trust for eternity. But do not think me so narrow and unreasonable as to expect that you should think as I do on many questions. Still more, never imagine that I shall chide you, even in my thoughts, for love of your kindred and people, or the belief that they honestly and heroically did what ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... Amidst torrents of rain, we made the fearful transition from the ship to the tug, while both vessels were in violent agitation. It was done. And now we were in the "monster's" own bosom, expecting every moment his bowels to burst, and send us into eternity. The noise of the engine, the grunting of the steam, the raging of the wind, the pelting of the rain, and the roaring of the thunder, made it almost impossible to hear anything besides; but I managed to shout in my wife's ear the natural, though not very consolatory question, "Were we ever ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... in apparent changelessness in a silent rose-and-white eternity, so she seemed to herself a stationary being. But the convolvulus has budded and bloomed and closed again while you thought her still, and she dies—the rayed and rosy cup so full of airy sweetness—she ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... the terrors of the life after death which assailed him. The thought of eternity brought terrible visions in its train, and Ali shuddered at the prospect of Al-Sirat, that awful bridge, narrow as a spider's thread and hanging over the furnaces of Hell which a Mussulman must cross in order to arrive at the gate of Paradise. ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... tradesman could afford not to be in relations with it. He had induced all Llandudno to perform the same act daily for nearly a whole season, and he now wished to induce all the vast Five Towns to perform the same act to his profit for all eternity. ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... how could the man who had been the cause of the loss of two immortal souls, save his own, and the consequences of his refusal to marry Ned Kavanagh and Mary Byrne seemed to reach to the very ends of Eternity. ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... philosophers have courageously come forward and assured us that the hypothesis of a deity as the creator and preserver of the universe is quite superfluous, and that all things came into being or have existed from eternity without the help of any divine spirit, and that they will continue to exist without it to the end, if end indeed there is to be. But on the whole these daring speculators appear to be in a minority. ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... have said before, would reject the very idea of such a trial marriage with the utmost scorn and indignation, because he feels certain that his love is eternal and unalterable. Time may show that he was mistaken, but that does not affect his present feeling. That sublime confidence in the eternity of his passion is one of the hall-marks of romantic love. The Egyptian had it not. He not only sanctioned degrading trial marriages, but enacted a barbarous law which enabled a man to divorce any wife at pleasure by simply pronouncing the words "thou art expelled." In modern Egypt, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... was not the same. No, different! The baby pushed everything else on to another plane. He was a terrific intruder; not one minute of her old daily life was left; he made no compromise whatever. If she turned away her gaze from him he might pop off into eternity ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... its loneliness; when my soul struggles to free itself from the shackles of the flesh that it may spread its wings to meet that other soul which made earth heaven for me here, and will, I know, make all eternity ecstatic as a dream for me hereafter. It is good to suffer, yes; but surely I suffer enough? My husband—if I cry to him, he will not hear me; if I go down on my knees beside his grave, and dig my arms in deep, deep, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... outrage and exasperate them, and make your own Government fraudulent and contemptible in their eyes. If any human action can deserve it, the hounds of hell ought to hunt your soul and Hindman's for it through all eternity. ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... raised the world from barbarism to civilization. Its influence has, in the course of centuries, abolished slavery, ennobled work, emancipated women, and revealed eternity. But was it dogma that brought these blessings? It is possible to avoid misunderstandings with regard to all subjects except those which transcend human conception, and these are the very subjects over which men have fought and desolated the world for the last eighteen hundred ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... contained in that article in "the Assembly's Catechism," viz., "that God, from all eternity, hath ordained whatsoever comes to pass in time." From hence naturally follow the ensuing ...
— A Solemn Caution Against the Ten Horns of Calvinism • Thomas Taylor
... between twice ascertaining their position, to wait for a period that felt like an eternity, walking about miserably, and smoking flavourless cigarettes;—then he would stand amazed, incredulous, when, with a smirk (as it almost struck him) of ironical complacence, they would attest that his eternity had lasted something near ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... prisoners at the present day—for then, as now, man groaned at being an inferior, and he had much more than that to groan over in those days of strifes and dirt. And yet every one of those serfs was God's child, as well as the baron who enslaved him. To himself he was a world with an eternity, and of as much importance as all other men. Through what strange heresies and insurrections, based either on innate passion or religious conviction, do we not find Republicanism bursting out in every age, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... that day amid the sturdy, natural-minded population of a muling village not far from Bursley. Seldom have I had such a bath in the pure fluid of human nature. All sense of time was lost. I lived in an eternity. I could not suggest to my host that we should depart. I could, however, decline more whisky. And I could, given the chance, discourse with gay despair concerning the miserable wreck that I should be on the morrow in consequence of this ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... tell of its height by the shadow, so may we lead forth this craving of ours to the midst of the plain that is lit by the sun of external reality, that thus we may tell what relation exists between the shadow thrown by the hour and the dome of eternity. ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... horse caravan and human beast of burden. Nature seems to look down upon man and his earth-scouring contrivances, and assert, "Man, begone! I will have none of thee." And the mountains turn upwards to the sky in silent reverence to their Maker, whose work must in the main remain unchanged until eternity. ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... that I never say anything against marryin' twice. Some folks are made for each other, but they make mistakes in the road and git lost, and don't git found till they've been through a heap o' tribulation, and, maybe, the biggest half o' their life's gone. But then, they've got all eternity before 'em, and there's time enough there to find all they've lost and more besides. But Mary found her portion o' happiness before it was too late. Elbert Madison was the man she married. He was an old ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... to mind We sat the livelong day in a golden carriage, Squandering a fortune, forby the tanner I dropt? They wouldn't stop to let me pick it up; And when we alighted from the roundabout, Some skunk had pouched it: may he pocket it Red-hot in hell through all eternity! If I'd that fortune now safe in my kist! But I was a scatterpenny: and you were bonnie— Pink as a dog-rose were your plump cheeks then: Your hair'd the gloss and colour of clean straw: And when, at darkening, the ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... true light of heaven; In what a world of love we live and breathe; On what a tide of truth our souls are borne! Yet we're but bubbles in the whirl of life, Mere flecks upon its ever-restless sea, Meteors in its ever-changing sky. Eternity alone is worth the thought That we expend upon the passing hour, Chasing the gaudy butterflies that lure Our footsteps from the path that leads us home. We will not see the beacon on the rock; The prompter is unheeded; and the spark Of the true spirit quenched in utter night, ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... in Russia, but it was on a long visit and under conditions which were calculated, beyond anything that has happened since down to to-day, to reveal to me the whole secret of the Russian soul, In 1892, when the cholera had come sweeping up from the south, I travelled for weeks that seemed like an eternity in the little towns of Galicia and the cities beyond the Russian frontier. The Great Death darkened my sky over many hundreds of miles of travel. I visited the plague spots where men's lives were being ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... a central work, has all the peace of the Christian Eternity, but only in part its gladness. Young children wreathe round the tomb a garland of abundant flowers, but she herself, Ilaria, yet sleeps; the time is not yet come for her to be awakened ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... nymph Egeria, and then the Hippodrome of Caracalla, the ruined tombs along the Via Appia, and the tomb of Metella, which is the first to give one a true idea of what solid masonry really is. These men worked for eternity—all causes of decay were calculated, except the rage of the spoiler, which nothing can resist. The remains of the principal aqueduct are highly venerable. How beautiful and grand a design, to supply a whole ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... he declared, "if such extreme measures should become necessary, I can promise you one thing—you shall have a quicker passage into Eternity than they." ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... The Index to Eternity; He can not miss Of endless bliss That takes this chart to steer ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson |
