"Eternity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the "Nancy" was utterly useless, and obtained their unwilling consent to have it renewed. But for this it would have shared the fate of the foremast, and those who now clung to it would have been in eternity. But although the mast was strong, its step and holdfasts, Bax knew, were the reverse of sound; and while he stood there cheering his companions with hopeful remarks, he alone knew how frail was the foundation on which ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... that condition of existence whence there is no return! Casting off all kinds of attachments, arrived at certainty by reflection with the aid of the mind, I shall attain to that end! I shall attain to that situation in which my Soul will have tranquillity, and when I shall be able to dwell for eternity without being subject to decrepitude or change. It is, however, certain that that high end cannot be attained without the aid of Yoga. One that has attained to the state of perfect knowledge and enlightenment never ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... after she was prescribed for. He gave her change of scene and rest. He has quite a thriving little cemetery filled with people who have succeeded in cording up enough of his change of scene and rest to last them through all eternity. He was called once to prescribe for a man whose head had been caved in by a stone match-box, and, after treating the man for asthma and blind staggers, he prescribed rest and change of scene for him, too. The poor asthmatic ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... becomes, if truly recognized, a friendly and redemptive power. Then, too, time is a variable factor. It is degree, not duration, that it means. The consequences of an error may be accepted and annulled swiftly. Intensity of feeling will condense a year, an eternity, even, into an hour. And the "new day," days in which, as Doctor ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... His Son, there is absolutely no real happiness in this world outside the clean, sweet way of Duty. If you profess you love a woman, but shirk your duty by her, of what worth is such love? Is God of less importance to you? Is Eternity of less importance? Are King and Country, and the future of our race and the millions who depend on us for light and guidance and protection, of less importance? As God hears me, nothing is of any importance, beside the one thing vital to salvation, to happiness, to honour, ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... his details in proportion; the autobiographer's usual fault, artistically at least, being an inordinate valuation of small concerns, because they happened to him. To St. Augustine, while not the smallest human event is without significance, in its relation to eternity, not the greatest human event is of importance, in its relation to time; and his own share in it would but induce a special, it may seem an exaggerated, humility on his part. Thus, speaking of his early studies, his triumphs in them, not without a certain naivete: ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the final witness to human mutability—that these commemorative cravings clustered most thickly. Might not even death itself be humbled, if one could recall enough—if one asserted, with a sufficiently passionate and reiterated emphasis, the eternity of love? Accordingly, every bed in which Victoria slept had attached to it, at the back, on the right-hand side, above the pillow, a photograph of the head and shoulders of Albert as he lay dead, surmounted ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... Scriptures thou shalt publish, for the worthy and the unworthy alike to read; but the last seventy books thou shalt withhold from the populace, for the perusal of the wise of thy people." On account of his literary activity, he is called "the Scribe of the science of the Supreme Being unto all eternity." (50) ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... natural life that held the soaring spirit fettered to the perishing things of this outer world; but you have felt that a new and better life has been born within you, and have tasted some of its purer pleasures. Oh, sir! let not the life of this world extinguish a fire that is kindled for eternity." ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... the occupation of the blessed throughout eternity, although He has not revealed to His creatures the way in which they are to be employed. That surpasses human comprehension," ...
— Mary Liddiard - The Missionary's Daughter • W.H.G. Kingston
... of Gingerford, as we said before, was saved from blight. The beggar-boy awakes this Sunday morning, not in the blaze of Eternity, but in that dim nook of the domain of Time, Nigger Williams's hut. He made his couch, not on the freezing ground, but in a bunk of the low-roofed garret. His steaming clothes had been taken off, a dry shirt had been given him, and he had Joe ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... he were blessing me in God's name. Then he said, in that low, soft, solemn tone which sounds to me so very high and holy, as if an angel spoke to me:—"Cary, dear child, the whole thing depends—your soul and your eternity depend—on whether you trust the Lord Jesus." Then he went out of the room, and left me alone, as if he wanted me to think well about that before he ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... of life to light the fire on the new hearth. Digitalis, sarsaparilla, eupatorium, she had chosen, for the health of the body; a fern leaf for grace and beauty; the oak and the elm for peace and the civic virtues; evergreen, pine, and hemlock for the aspiring life of the mind and the eternity of thought; rosemary for remembrance, and pansies for thoughts. Firing the torch, she said, "With these holy associations we light this fire, that from this building in which the sun and stars are to be observed, true life may ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... one central point in which an endlessly converging spiral ends. Hegel's "bad infinite" belongs to the eddy as well as to the line. "Progress?" writes our author. "And to what? Time turns a weary and a wistful face; has he not traversed an eternity? and shall another give the secret up? We have dreamed of a climax and a consummation, a final triumph where a world shall burn en barbecue; but there is not, cannot be, a purpose of eternity; it shall pay mainly as it goes, or not at all. The show is on; and what a show, if we will but ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... passing souls we pray, Saviour, meet them on their way; Let their trust lay hold on Thee Ere they touch eternity. ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... because their grief is not very deep. I cannot go to London to bid you goodbye unless you promise to see me in the convent. Worse than a death-bed goodbye would be the goodbye I should bid you, and it, too, would be for eternity. But say I can go to see you in the convent, and I will come to ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... teaches the magnitude of the Universe, 711-m. Science teaches that man is not the central point of the Universe, 711-m. Science, the higher, known as the Knowledge of the Word, 253-l. Science, which is the reflection of God's glory, receives the Seal of His Eternity, 842-l. Sciences: Astrology generally practiced and deemed the mother of, 463-u. Sciences originally concealed in Sanctuaries opened up by the Sohar, 843-l. Scientific footprints discovered in the Symbolism ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... allow of her being genteel in every thing."—Ib., p. 57. "Provided you do not dislike being dirty when you are invisible."—Ib., p. 58. "There is now an imperious necessity for her being acquainted with her title to eternity."—Ib., p. 120. "Discarding the restraints of virtue, is misnamed ingenuousness."—Ib., p. 105. "The legislature prohibits opening shop of a Sunday."—Ib., p. 66. "To attempt proving that any thing ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... like a brimful vessel, overflowed with the quintessence of what we call divine; and from this effluence emanated the divine Mind, the pure intelligence which is to the One what light is to the sun. This Mind with its vitality—a life not of time but of eternity—could stir or remain passive as it listed; it included a Plurality, while the One was Unity, and forever indivisible. The concept of each living creature proceeded from the second: The eternal Mind; and this vivifying and energizing ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... True. My heart cleaved the eternity of separation, beaconing my sad return to them, and I followed gladly, hope being ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... when a lucky squall came to our rescue. My wife, hearing the order given about the boats, remarked to my mother, 'Isn't that nice? We shall soon be ashore!' Thus does the female mind unconsciously skirt along the verge of eternity. Our voyage up here was most disastrous - calms, squalls, head sea, waterspouts of rain, hurricane weather all about, and we in the midst of the hurricane season, when even the hopeful builder and owner of the yacht had pronounced these seas unfit for her. We ran out of ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were to be known? Where then would be thy triumph?" He raised his clenched hands fiercely, sending forth his empty challenge to the heedless stars. "Thy wife is not all thine, my lord! Her body thou mayst purchase and possess, but her soul is mine, mine, mine, for all time and all eternity! I, who waked it from its empty sleep—I, who taught it first to live and love—I am her soul's lord even as thou art her body's master—I, ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... only. He was sentenced to die on the gallows. He received the announcement with stoic indifference, and was executed at Jerusalem, the county seat of Southampton, in April, 1831. He died like a man, bravely, calmly; looking into eternity, made radiant by a faith that had never faltered. He prophesied that on the day of his execution the sun would be darkened, and other evidences of divine disapprobation would be seen. The sheriff was much impressed by Nat.'s ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... wings, By thoughts and wishes manifold, whose breath Is freshness and whose mighty pulse is peace. Palter no question of the dim Beyond; Cut loose the bark; such voyage itself is rest; Majestic motion, unimpeded scope, A widening heaven, a current without care. Eternity!—Deliverance, Promise, Course! Time-tired souls salute thee ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... to reach him. Once the present writer was talking with a friend who has equal fame as a statesman and a man of letters, and he said, 'Every day I live, Politics, which are affairs of Man and Time, interest me less, while Theology, which is an affair of God and Eternity, interests me more.' As with him, so with many, though the many feel that their interest is in theology and not in dogma. Dogma, they know, is but a series of resolutions framed by a council or parliament, which they do not respect any the more because the parliament was composed ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... like the Vedas and the Gathas and the Jewish Scriptures, was exalted in later stages of the religion to the highest conceivable honours; and one of the greatest controversies of Islam raged round the question whether it had existed from eternity and ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... age, and perchance for its end. They say that it is very doubtful whether the world was made from nothing, or from the ruins of other worlds, or from chaos, but they certainly think that it was made, and did not exist from eternity. Therefore they disbelieve in Aristotle, whom they consider a logician and not a philosopher. From analogies, they can draw many arguments against the eternity of the world. The sun and the stars they, so to speak, regard as the living representatives and signs of God, as the temples and holy ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... order. And here I stood and watched the junks disappear down the river one after the other, and I saw the truth of what Hosie had written that, as their masts are always unshipped in the down passage, the junks seem to be "passing with their human freight into eternity." ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... or who are building the Panama Canal? They have and are performing a task that may safely be compared with the extraordinary achievements of Hercules; works which, according to human conception, will last into eternity. The names and the characters of these workmen are unknown. The historians, coldly and disinterestedly, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... eternity Are those strange minutes that I gain, Mazed with the doubt of love and pain, When I thy delicate face may see, A ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... to moisten their mouths, several poor wretches were suffocated, like those in the black hole,—with this only difference, that we were confined by water instead of strong walls; and the least movement or relaxation of our hold would have plunged us into eternity. ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... enlivening bustle; in every aspect, I loved the world so long as I could behold it with young eyes and dance through it with a young heart. The earth had been made so beautiful, that I longed for no brighter sphere, but only an ever-youthful eternity in this. I clung to earth as if my beginning and ending were to be there, unable to imagine any but an earthly happiness, and choosing such, with all its imperfections, rather than perfect bliss which might be alien from it. Alas! I had ...
— Fragments From The Journal of a Solitary Man - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... look on life as a huge tumour from which death sets them free. All the same they know not where they were before birth, nor where they will be after death. They ignore their passions. They take no account of their ears and eyes. Backwards and forwards through all eternity, they do not admit a beginning or an end. They stroll beyond the dust and dirt of mortality, to wander in the realms of inaction. How should such men trouble themselves with the conventionalities of this world, or care what ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... meet! For, thank God, the stream of happy humanity that rolls on like a gleaming river, and the stream of the suffering and distressed and ruined of this earth, both empty into the same great ocean of eternity and mingle like the waters, and there is a God who shall judge the merciful and ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... excess of vital emotions, had worn Denas out. Never before had the life into which she was born looked so unlovely to her. She preferred the twitter and twaddle of Priscilla's workroom to the intense realities of an existence always verging on eternity. She dared to contrast those large, heroic fishers, with their immovable principles and their constant fight with all the elemental forces for their daily bread, with Roland Tresham; and to decide that Roland's delicate ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... when brought face to face with the world's threefold burden of sorrow, sickness and death. The renunciation of power, wealth and love follows, liberating the soul for the pilgrimage along the mystic "path," pursued until "the dew-drop fell into the shining sea" of Eternity. The manifold details of the Buddha's traditional career are vividly pourtrayed on the hoary walls of volcanic trachyte in outline clear and sharp, as though the sculptors of the eighth century had just laid down burin and chisel. The indented leaves of the Bo-Tree, beneath ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... The old desire to fight the bad fight was turned into the new channel of determination to fight the good fight. Today Will Jones is still a good fighter, and I hope he always will be, and some day will be crowned with eternal victory; for he who fights the good fight is fighting for eternity. ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... principally I comend & bequeath my soule unto the ever blessed hands of Almighty God my heavenly father my maker & creator, whoe out of his meer mercy, free will & love to mankinde & to me in pticuler did vouchsafe to send his onely begotten sonne before all eternity, Christ Jesus the pmissed Messias into this world to save sinners (whereof w^th S^t. Paull I confesse my selfe the greatest) to laye downe his life for mankinde & that he dyed for me & for my salvac{COMBINING OVERLINE}on, & that he rose againe the third day for my iustificac{COMBINING ...
— Spadacrene Anglica - The English Spa Fountain • Edmund Deane
... he is too strong for you, nor may the might that can turn a few bricks to dust and shatter the bones of men prevail against him who is shaped from the heart of a mountain and holds the spirit of eternity. So at least I think: but even if it is decreed otherwise, what will that avail you? If it should please the god to leave us because of your arts, the Fung will still remain to avenge him ere they follow. Then I swear to you by my majesty and by the bones of my ancestors who sit in the caves ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... itself will be a poor approximation, leave the inscrutable purport of them an acknowledged secret—or at most, in reverent faith, pause over the mysterious vestiges of Him whose path is in the great deep of Time, whom History indeed reveals, but only all History and in Eternity will ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... filled the measure of your existence to overflowing, then say, if you will, that you have had enough of life. Your life is not the life which is bounded by the union of your soul and body, your life is that which shall continue fresh in the memory of ages to come, which posterity will cherish, and eternity itself keep guard over. Much has been done which men will admire: much remains to be done, which they can praise. They will read with wonder of empires and provinces, of the Rhine, the ocean, and the ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... was the strange thing: he had no sooner seen this miracle than his mind was changed within him, and he cared naught for the Chinese Evil, and little enough for Kokua; and had but the one thought, that here he was bound to the bottle imp for time and for eternity, and had no better hope but to be a cinder for ever in the flames of hell. Away ahead of him he saw them blaze with his mind's eye, and his soul shrank, and darkness ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... those women, expecting things of her. They would be so affable at first. She had been through it a million times—all her life—all eternity. They would smile those hateful women's smiles—smirks—self-satisfied smiles as if everybody were agreed about everything. She loathed women. They always smiled. All the teachers had at school, all the girls, but Lilla. Eve did... ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... life so long? May it not be better to wait until its little day is done, and the summer night of old age has yielded to a new morning, before attaining that acme of joy? Are there enough successive grades of bliss for all eternity, if so much be consummated here? Must all novels end with an earthly marriage, and ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... we have sinned and know that sin will keep us away from living in eternity in the presence of God, we are filled with sorrow. First, we do not want to be cast into the "lake of fire," nor be with the devil and his angels as Jesus has warned. He spoke of those being "cast into hell, into the fire that never shall ...
— The Key To Peace • A. Marie Miles
... his benefactor, and a little child with its hands folded. On the lower step rests a mourning genius beside a sleeping lion, and a bas-relief on the pyramid above represents an angel carrying Christina's image, surrounded with the emblem of eternity, to heaven. A spirit of deep sorrow, which is touchingly portrayed in the countenance of the old man, pervades ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... he found company, The patriarch Enoch, and the mighty seer Elias; nor as yet those sainted three Have seen corruption, but in garden, clear Of earth's foul air, will joy eternity Of spring, till they angelic trumpets hear, Sounding through heaven and earth, proclaim aloud Christ's second advent on ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... traversing such a course, he will again rise to the probationary state of humanity, where according to contingencies he may rise or fall; yet, should he fall, he shall rise again, and should this happen for millions of ages, the path of happiness is still open to him, and will so remain to all eternity, for sooner or later he will infallibly arrive at his destined station or happiness, from which he can never fall. This doctrine of metamorphosis or evolution, attributed to the Druids and the Welsh bards, is succinctly but fully ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... is a description of Shelley himself following Byron and Moore—the "Pilgrim of Eternity," and Ierne's "sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong"—to the couch where Keats lies dead. There is both pathos and unconscious irony in his making these two poets the chief mourners, when we remember what Byron wrote about Keats in "Don Juan", and what Moore afterwards ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... were sacred, and it was forbidden to put them to death. They had a dog-god and a cat-goddess, and they honoured the beetle because they saw it rolling a ball of earth in which to lay its eggs, and fancied it an emblem of eternity; and thus all these creatures were consecrated, and when they died were rolled up in fine linen and spices, just as the ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... fall until the sergeant, at a sign from his officer, advanced with a reserved musket, and quickly blew out his brains! His body was removed. The troops were formed into column, the band struck up a lively air, and thus was a human being launched into eternity. ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... sixteenth century, through the influence of foreign ideas and of the counter- reformation which then began, the whole question was judged more strictly: Varchi discovers that the succession of the legitimate children 'is ordered by reason, and is the will of heaven from eternity.' Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici founded his claim to the lordship of Florence on the fact that he was perhaps the fruit of a lawful marriage, and at all events son of a gentlewoman, and not, like Duke Alessandro, of a servant girl. At this time began ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... inform two bodies; that magic is good and lawful; that the Holy Spirit is nothing but the Soul of the World, which Moses meant when he wrote that it brooded on the waters; that the world has existed from eternity; that Moses wrought his miracles by magic, being more versed therein than the Egyptians, and that he composed his own laws; that the Holy Scriptures are a dream, and that the devils will be saved; that only the Jews descend from Adam and Eve, the rest of men from that pair whom God ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... particular material and the narrow conditions which are at her disposal at a given time and place. To seize the pure ideal of beauty which Nature suggests, but never quite realizes; to select from the universe of space and the eternity of time those materials and forms which are perfectly adapted to portray the ideal beauty; to clothe the abodes and the whole physical environment of man with that beauty which is suggested to us in sky and stream and field and flower; to present to us for perpetual ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... With halberds and with golden helms, there stood it now On guard around the sanctuary of the god. Of giant stones alone the massive wall was built, And joined with active skill, a noble giant work For all eternity (as is Upsala's shrine,) Where Norseland saw its Valhal in an earthly mold. It stood there in its grandeur on the mountain cliff, And mirrored in the ocean wave its lofty brow, While round about it, like a zone of beauteous flowers, Far stretched the dale of ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... public and plotting cowardly assassination in private. Of course, the Governor was right. Every good citizen of this country will commend him for prompt and vigorous action. In less than an hour after the bomb had sent the seven men of the Harvey Home Guards to eternity, the Governor had proclaimed martial law in this district, and from now on, no more incendiary language, no more damnable riots, miscalled parades will menace property, and no more criminal acts done under the cover of the ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... dear sister—every thing that is yet to come, whether in this world or another. It is a solemn word, Hetty, and most so, I fear, to them that think the least about it. Mother's future is eternity; ours may yet mean what will happen while we live in this world—Is not that a canoe just passing behind the castle—here, more in the direction of the point, I mean; it is hid, now; but certainly I saw a canoe stealing behind ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... more grievous because the Egyptians cannot have constructed many after the same type. Glazed bricks, painted tiles, and enamelled mosaics are readily injured; and in the judgment of a people enamoured of stability and eternity, that would be the gravest of ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... beamed in her wonderful eyes, the color had returned to her cheeks; and to Bob McGraw, faltering there on the edge of eternity, her radiant regal presence brought a wondrous peace. For a moment he saw the moonlight reflecting the light in her eyes; a strand of her hair blew across his face—he smelled its perfume; the intoxication of her glorious personality caused him to marvel and doubt his own waning sense ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... which is enforced by the narrative of the Ascension is the permanence, the eternity of the humanity of Jesus Christ. He ascended up where He was before, but He who ascended is not altogether the same as He who had been there before, for He has taken up with Him our nature to the centre of the universe and the throne of God, and there, 'bone of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... this case, seemed to mean doing nothing, but simply being amused—a definition that finds general recognition among many, there being those who dream of heaven as a place where they can be as everlastingly lazy as they choose, through all eternity, with the celestial choirs forever tooting soft music in the distance, and streams of milk and honey flowing perpetually to their lips, all for their amusement and delectation. Perhaps this last is the correct idea. It might as well be confessed that on this ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... 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 ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... at his double who met his gaze firmly, erect, tense, silent. The others looked in sheer stupefaction from one to the other of the two Mr. Bellwards. For nearly a minute the only sound in the room was the deep ticking of the clock, counting away the seconds separating him from eternity, Desmond thought. ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... doctrine, time is still spoken of: one pronounces the word, but one does not think of the thing. For time is here deprived of efficacy, and if it does nothing, it is nothing. Radical mechanism implies a metaphysic in which the totality of the real is postulated complete in eternity, and in which the apparent duration of things expresses merely the infirmity of a mind that cannot know everything at once. But duration is something very different from this for our consciousness, that is to say, for that which is most indisputable ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... springs to life:— Though brief and sad thy story, Thy years all spent in care and gloom, Look up, look up; Eternity and glory Dawn through ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of self-defense; but if it weren't for your discretion, I shouldn't tell it to you, for I'm an old bird, young lady, and can't be caught with chaff. There are many worthy persons who may rise to lofty heights in eternity, who nevertheless, meanwhile are not desirable to sit opposite a man at his breakfast table. A visit, Anna Belle, a short visit from my daughter Julia is all I shall ask for at first, and I shall test her, test her, my dear. I'll look at her through a magnifying ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... The other night when you were telling me your little story, you were near sending yourself into eternity—as near as I am knocking this ash off my cigar." His little finger almost touched the ash. "Your hand was as near touching a wire charged with death. I saw it. It would have been better for me if you had gone; but I shut off the electricity. Suppose I hadn't, could I have been ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... images in the Catholic chapel till he was breathless and then came to the officers' state dinner so exhausted that when asked to pronounce blessing he could only mutter, "Good Lord, we have so much to thank Thee for, time is too short; we must leave it to eternity. Amen"; how the New Englanders, unused to French wines, drank themselves torpid on the stores of the fort cellar; how the French the next year made superhuman effort to regain Louisburg, only to have a magnificent fleet of one hundred and fifty sail wrecked on Sable Island, Duke d'Anville, the commander, ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... Shall whisper to the good, and cheer their soul. God shall himself his favour'd creature guide Where living waters pour their blissful tide, Where the enlarg'd, exulting, wond'ring mind Shall soar, from weakness and from guilt refin'd; Where perfect knowledge, bright with cloudless rays, Shall gild eternity's unmeasur'd days; Where friendship, unembitter'd by distrust, Shall in immortal bands unite the just; Devotion rais'd to rapture breathe her strain, And love in his ...
— Poems (1786), Volume I. • Helen Maria Williams
... town was enter'd. Oh eternity!- 'God made the country and man made the town,' So Cowper says—and I begin to be Of his opinion, when I see cast down Rome, Babylon, Tyre, Carthage, Nineveh, All walls men know, and many never known; And pondering on the present and the ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... world) mixing with each of the three corresponding qualities of pradhana (the active or spiritual cause of the world) in various proportions produces the mundane order of things. Thus is proved the eternity of prakriti or nature and is also established ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... among men? Who can be sure of himself for a day—an hour? Precious few! None, certainly, who do not distrust their own strength with a humility only to be won from prayer—prayer coupled with moderate desires, and the presence of a constant thought, which teaches that time is a mere agent of eternity, and he who works for the one only, will not even be secure of peace during the period for which he works. Truly, he who lives not for the future is the very last who may reasonably hope to enjoy the blessings ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... twenty-three and a half degrees from the Pole, it seems as though she had entered a new region, "that region of Desolation and Silence," as Edgar Poe says; that magic person of splendour and glory in which the Eleanora's singer longed to be shut up to all eternity; that ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... us," he murmured uncertainly, "are weak. The best among us sins in a day enough to blacken eternity. And unless we believe, and have faith in the Divine Mercy of the Father, and confess—confession—" His voice grew stronger and into it crept the rapt note of one whose auditor is within. "Confession! A sin confessed ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the most important thing in human life, for what is pleasure after the departure of time? and the most consolatory, since pain, when pain has passed, is nothing. Time is the wheel-track in which we roll on towards eternity, conducting us to the Incomprehensible. In its progress there is a ripening power, and it ripens us the more, and the more powerfully, when we duly estimate it. Listen to its voice, do not waste it, but regard ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... black mood that she would have liked Philip to be tortured through all eternity, because of the horrible suffering he inflicted on the people of Holland; but I said the worst punishment would be for his soul to have been purified at death, that he might suddenly realize the fiendishness ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... fill insane asylums and penitentiaries, and alms-houses and dens of shame. The bodies of this infection lie in the hospitals and in the graves, while their souls are being tossed over into a lost eternity, an avalanche of horror and despair. The London plague was nothing to it. That counted its victims by thousands; but this modern pest has already shoveled its millions into the charnel-house of the morally dead. The longest rail ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... life was a beautiful pathway of flowers. The sun shone on the flowers, the stars hung overhead. You think of her now as you thought of her then in all the gentleness of her beauty. You think of her now as the mother of your child. No thorns are remembered. The heart whose beat measured an eternity of love to you lies under your feet but the love of her still lives in your being. You forget the injury, you forget the disgrace, you forget all of the present, only remembering the happiness ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... the station toward nine o'clock; that meant about four hours and a half more. He was very patient; he would even have been content not to move again, and he found a certain charm in fancying that his night vigil would last through eternity. ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... although a widow and nearly forty, was marrying beneath her. But he has been a good brother to Clara, and a careful guardian of her estate. Ah, young gentleman, you cannot appreciate, except in imagination, what it means, to one standing on the brink of eternity, to feel sure that he will live on in his children and ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... the idea that at death one dies utterly and is buried in the earth, were patterns cut from the stuff of reality. They were relevant to fate, typical of life, in a way that gayer things, like the song of girls or the field-checked pleasantness of plains or the dream of a soul's holiday in eternity, were not; And in the bitter eloquence of this pale woman she rapturously recognised that same ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... urges objections drawn from the origin of some of man's mental faculties, such as "the capacity to form ideal conceptions of space and time, of eternity and infinity—the capacity for intense artistic feelings of pleasure, in form, colour and composition—and for those abstract notions of form and number which render geometry and arithmetic possible," also from the origin of the ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... was the humblest and simplest statement of his case. To him the visible world was a veil worn thin by the pressure of the reality behind it; it had the translucence that belongs to it in the form of its eternity. He was in a position to judge. He had lived face to face and hand to hand with all forms of corporeal horror, and there was no mass of disease or of corruption that he did not see in its resplendent and divine transparency. ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... the overseer, bore him to the ground, and wrenched the shot-gun from his hand. Clubbing the weapon, he raised it to brain him. The movement occupied but a second; the gun was descending, and in another instant Moye would have met Sam in eternity, had not a brawny arm caught the Colonel's, and, winding itself around his body, pinned his limbs to his side so that motion was impossible. The woman, half frantic with excitement, thrust open the door when ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... not in matter, but in spirit. But the element of spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the longest series of events, the oldest chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle of the universal man, from whom the known individuals proceed, centuries are points, and all history is but the epoch of ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... anchored there for ever, by the equally matched forces tugging in opposite directions. There is such a dead line between all the planets, and our principal danger lies in falling into one of these, for we should remain there a twinkling star throughout eternity! We must trust to our momentum to carry us past this point, and into space where the gravitational attraction of the other planet is paramount. Then we must promptly change our current from negative to positive, so that the other planet will attract us to ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... and preserve him! O God, shade me with Thy shadow in that day when there is no shade but Thy shadow, and cause me to drink from the cup of Thy apostle Mohammed—may God bless him and preserve him! that pleasant draught after which is no thirst to all eternity. O Lord of honor and glory."* [*I have preferred to give, instead of the translation of these prayers which I obtained in Malacca, one introduced by Canon Tristram into a delightful paper on Mecca in the Sunday at ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... than in the humanheartedness which was so striking a feature of the life of Jesus among men. When we think of him as the Son of God, the question arises, Did he really care for personal friendships with men and women of the human family? In the home from which he came he had dwelt from all eternity in the bosom of the Father, and had enjoyed the companionship of the highest angels. What could he find in this world of imperfect, sinful beings to meet the cravings of his heart for fellowship? Whom could he find among earth's sinful creatures worthy of his friendship, or capable ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... universe with stern justice, and though He withdrew Himself from the sight and understanding of man, His image, He was nevertheless a living, thinking, moving Being, though His span of existence was eternity, His mind omniscience, His sphere of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... it great ships floated at anchor and islets nestled down; all round the sheltering hills verily clapped their hands. In the great dome of the universe there was not a cloud. Through the starless windows of that glorious dome they could see into the fathomless depths of Eternity. Under the magic of the moon not even the sordid work of man struck a discordant note. At their feet the faint ripplings of this crystal lake whispered their ceaseless lullaby and close behind them the trees rustled softly in the languid breathings of the sleeping sea. Of ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... comes with a bound, Spring the deliverer, Spring, song-leader in woods, chorally resonant; Spring, flower-planter in meadows, Child-conductor in willowy Fields deep dotted with bloom, daisies and crocuses: Here that child from his heart drinks of eternity: O child, happy are children! She still smiles on their innocence, She, dear mother in God, fostering violets, Fills earth full of her scents, voices and violins: Thus one cunning in music Wakes old chords in the memory: Thus fair earth in the Spring leads her performances. One more touch of the ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wooed a Tresilyan like a yeoman's daughter." The homicide wrote in his confession of all this that, as he laid the head gently down, a smile came upon the lips before they set. Was it that the parting spirit—standing on the threshold of Eternity, and almost within the light of the grand secret—fathomed the earth-worm's miserable vanity, and could not ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... reproach] When you loved me I gave you the whole sun and stars to play with. I gave you eternity in a single moment, strength of the mountains in one clasp of your arms, and the volume of all the seas in one impulse of your souls. A moment only; but was it not enough? Were you not paid then for all the rest of your struggle on earth? Must I mend ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... sky; and thought, surely, with the talisman she had just found of heavenly love and sympathy and strength, she could walk the rest of her way through life and bear it till the end. Then, by and by, beyond that dividing line of eternity, there would be bright heaven, instead of the dusky earth. If only she could prevent Basil from knowing how she felt, and so losing all peace in life himself. But his peace was so fixed in heaven, she wondered ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... 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 Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... the historian and with the moral philosopher, and, if he go beyond them both, no other human skill can match him. For as for the divine, with all reverence it is ever to be excepted, not only for having his scope as far beyond any of these, as eternity exceedeth a moment, but even for passing each ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... of limousines threw off teethy smiles. At least so Mr. Wrenn fancied as he whisked up Fifth Avenue, the skirts of his small blue double-breasted coat wagging. He was going blocks out of his way to the office; ready to defy time and eternity, yes, and even the office manager. He had awakened with Defiance as his bedfellow, and throughout breakfast at the hustler Dairy Lunch sunshine had flickered over the ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... would injure and displace white labor and white laborers. If there ever could be a proper time for mere catch arguments, that time surely is not now. In times like the present men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and in eternity. Is it true, then, that colored people can displace any more white labor by being free than by remaining slaves? If they stay in their old places, they jostle no white laborers; if they leave their old places, they leave them open to white laborers. Logically, there is neither ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... and then perish. Eugenie had begun to suffer. For her, wealth was neither a power nor a consolation; she could not live except through love, through religion, through faith in the future. Love explained to her the mysteries of eternity. Her heart and the Gospel taught her to know two worlds; she bathed, night and day, in the depths of two infinite thoughts, which for her may have had but one meaning. She drew back within herself, loving, ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... be kind to all Eternity. Thou hast one Virtue more, I pay thee Homage for; I heard from the Alcove how great a Mistress thou art in ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... stars; and He values the tears we shed for our sins more than the pain we should have felt to see Him suffer. Still continue to bring the fruits and flowers of piety and obedience to your parents to Jesus, and you will be permitted to wait upon Him in heaven for all eternity. ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... of blood mingle in my mouth with the sour taste of vomit. I felt delirious, lightheaded. After another eternity I wondered if I had really heard Dallisa's lilting croon or whether it was a nightmare born of ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... wrong, Duke," he murmured. "My love had blinded my wisdom with the heavy mask of egoism. On the threshold of eternity the truth seems clearer. Forgive me, De Morlay, ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... the hands of another—the Master of the ship. The ship is foundering. What then have I to do? I do the only thing that remains to me—to be drowned without fear, without a cry, without upbraiding God, but knowing that what has been born must likewise perish. For I am not Eternity, but a human being—a part of the whole, as an hour is part of the day. I must come like the hour, and like the ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... they are in fact. We must return to them the inheritance of which we have robbed them. And this must not be the act of a few English-knowing reformers merely, but it must be a conscious voluntary effort on the part of the masses. We may not wait till eternity for this much belated reformation. We must aim at bringing it about within this year of grace, probation, preparation and tapasya. It is a reform not to follow Swaraj but to ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... received it varied on record to the three thousandth time, and not so few: It hath these virtues beside: your head shall not ache under it, nor your brain leave you, without license; It will preserve your complexion to eternity; for no beam of the sun, should you wear it under zona torrida, hath power to approach it by two ells. It is proof against thunder, and enchantment; and was given me by a great man in Russia, as an especial prized present; and constantly affirm'd to be the hat that accompanied the politic ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... match across the rough wood of the chair-back, his ear all eager expectancy—and nothing happened. Thrice he did this fruitless thing, and something told him that a large section of the sulphur had been rubbed away into eternity. ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... tire yourself! What's the use of those grimaces? You're not afraid of eternity, are you? A good man like you, the Don Quixote of modern times! Come, let yourself go. There's not even any water in the well to splash about in. No, it's just a nice little slide into infinity. You can't so much as hear ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... the goddess of writing. She is named in the pyramid times, and appears in scenes of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties. Four pairs of elemental gods were worshipped at Hermopolis, each pair male and female; Heh, Eternity; Kek, Darkness; Nu, the heavenly ocean; Nenu, the Inundation. They are shown as human figures with the heads of frogs and serpents. There were also personifications of Seeing, Hearing, Taste, Perception, Strength, ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... they had been describing, for they were not Christian people and were not acquainted with the love of God. They were greatly interested in the things that pertain to this life, but seemed unconcerned about heaven, eternity, and the Bible. So Edwin continued to believe that some great man who had died and left the earth was living above the blue arch and that the electrical storms were in some way the result ...
— The Poorhouse Waif and His Divine Teacher • Isabel C. Byrum
... of their privilege, and to fight sturdily with each other in doing so; but the government concealed as much as possible, and also as long as possible; that is to say, the government resting on an assumed necessary eternity of privilege to monopolize the means ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... a certain animation had still reigned round the wharf, men crossing and going, one or two of the barges moving in or out alongside the quay. But for some time now darkness and silence had been the masters in this desolate spot, and that time had seemed to Sir Andrew an eternity. He had hobbled and tethered his horse, and stretched himself out at full length under the cart. Now and again he had crawled out from under this uncomfortable shelter and walked up and down in ankle-deep mud, trying to restore circulation in his stiffened limbs; now and again ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... with fragmentary tints from this and that ancestor. The analysis of a face into its ancestral elements requires that it should be examined in the very earliest infancy, before it has lost that ancient and solemn look it brings with it out of the past eternity; and again in that brief space when Life, the mighty sculptor, has done his work, and Death, his silent servant, lifts the veil and lets us look at the marble lines he has wrought so faithfully; and lastly, while a painter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... ransomed by a Victim of infinite value. They have themselves an infinite value. Nothing which goes on in them can be ignored. Their most trifling sins, their feeblest stirrings towards virtue, are vital for the eternity of their lot. All shall be attributed to them by the just Judge. The theft of an apple will weigh perhaps as heavily in the scales as the seizure of a province or a kingdom. The evil of sin is in the evil intention. Now the fate of a soul, created by ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... Lady Jane's husband, and the reputed father of the claimant, died in June 1764; but, before his decease, his depositions were taken in the presence of two ministers and of a justice of the peace. He asserted, "as one slipping into eternity, that the defendant (Archibald Stewart) and his deceased twin-brother were both born of the body of Lady Jane Douglas, his lawful ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... There was for such an one A different work among those given, Who've crossed the border of eternity In youthful heedlessness,—as unshriven Naked souls joined the great fraternity O' the dead, while yet their ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... to keep them from falling into a hand-to-mouth style of life, which would have brought them down to barbarism. We all need the same kind of assurance; and then, when we get it, such is the weakness of humanity, we are tempted to think that continuity means eternity, and that, because probably to-morrow shall be as this day, there will never come a to-morrow which shall be quite unlike to-day. The crust of cooled earth, on which we walk, is thick enough to bear man and all his ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... him, except that once, when I was slightly indisposed, he administered to me,—with the best intentions, no doubt,—a dose of Indian pills, which effectually knocked me out of time, as Mr. Morrissey would say,—not quite into eternity, but so near it that I perfectly remember one of the good ladies told me (after I had come to my senses a little, and was just ready for a sip of cordial and a word of encouragement), with that delightful plainness of speech which ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... condemned military Germany as a barbarous outlaw. The crimes committed with the connivance of the supreme military authorities, authorized by their instructions to their officers, have fouled the name German for eternity: it will be coupled with ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... appointed goal. She will soften the pains of sickness, continue with you even in the cold gloomy hour of death, and, cheating you with the smiles of her heaven-born sister, Hope, lead you triumphant to a blissful eternity. ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... should show your heart. For, lady, you deserve this state, Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near, And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found, Nor in thy marble vault shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust. The grave's a fine and private place, But none, I think, do ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... corrupt, and licentious financier, with others more slightly drawn, are seldom, if ever, out of drawing. The contemporary wash of colour passes, as it should, into something "fast"; you are in the Paris of the Regency, but you are at the same time in general human time and place, if not in eternity and infinity. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Temple used to conclude with the words "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel unto eternity;" but when the Sadducees, corrupting the faith, maintained that there was only one world, it was enacted that they should conclude with the words ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... eighth in number, reckoning from the ground floor upwards; there are seven worlds worse than itself beneath it, and two better ones above; with a few worlds more higher up still, to which the destroying flood does not reach, save once or twice in an eternity or so; and which, in consequence, have not to be re-created each time with the others. The special forms which the upper and nether worlds exhibit do not seem to be very well known; but that which man inhabits is "flat, like the flower of the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... essentials are as readily grasped by the clodhopper as by the profoundest scholar whose years are spent in delving into the mysteries of science. No finite mind can fathom the mysteries of life, of death, of sleep, of the beginning, the end, of eternity, of the real nature of the soul and of God, how He came into existence; nor, indeed, shall we ever comprehend in all their fullness the simplest phenomena around us. What is the essence of color or taste or ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... harmonies, O skilled to sing of time or eternity, God-gifted organ-voice of England, Milton, a name to resound for ages. German is, however, the only modern literature in which alcaics have been written with much success. They were introduced by Klopstock, and used by Holderlin, by Voss in his translations of Horace, by ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... a branch; eating my morsel almost by chance, observing a thousand and a thousand times the same things, and always with the same interest, because I always forgot them, were to me the means of passing an eternity without a weary moment. However elegant, admirable, and variegated the structure of plants may be, it does not strike an ignorant eye sufficiently to fix the attention. The constant analogy, with, at the same time, the prodigious variety which ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... eternity, nor human consolation, nor everlasting sleep, nor the satisfied judgment, nor attained ambition, even in love itself, that is the cure for things; it is the heart, the will, the being of the Father. While that remains, the irremediable, the irredeemable ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... placed his paw on the settee and gave a low bark to announce his joy at being among his friends. The sagacious brute seemed to understand how frail the tenure was that held them all suspended over eternity; for he did nothing more than rest the top of his paw on ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... blessings. I can still scarcely help thinking that God is preparing me for some severe trial; but if He will grant me His presence as He does now, no trial can seem severe. Oh, could I now drop the body, I would stand and cry to all eternity without being weary: God is holy, God is just, God is good; God is wise and faithful and true. Either of His perfections alone is sufficient to furnish matter for an eternal, unwearied song. Could I sing upon paper I should break forth into singing, for day and night I can do nothing but sing ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... shallower spirits among the guests chattered about the beauty of the night, and the sweetness of the bells. Deeper souls were silent, full of saddest thoughts. Who is there who has not lost something in the years gone by, which earth's longest future cannot restore? Only eternity can give back the ravished ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... Really exist? I think not, because if they did exist, if they really existed, existence would be suffering for them and they wouldn't content themselves with it. If they really and truly existed in time and space they would suffer not being of eternity and infinity. And this suffering, this passion, what is it but the passion of God in us? God who suffers in us from our temporariness and finitude, that divine suffering will burst all the puny bonds of logic with which they try to tie down their puny memories and their puny hopes, ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... angry or displeased with her or with her mother; and then I am to have tears, and explanations, and apologies: she has not a mind large enough to understand my character: and if I were to explain to eternity, she would be as much in the dark as ever. Yet, after all, there is something so ingenuous and affectionate about this girl that I cannot help loving her, and that is what provokes me; for she does not, and never can, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... character—its perils induce self-reliance and fearlessness, which are redeemed from conceit by a child-like simplicity arising naturally from the contemplation of an element menacing, invincible, and symbolical of eternity. Then, too, the legends of the sea invest the mind with a sensitive, poetic passion as delightful as it is unworldly, as reverent as it is credulous. No one would deride these superstitions who has watched, as I have, the various phases of the sea—its motions, its ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... points of analogy between ordinary death and spiritual death. Does ordinary death render a man insensible to the presence of material things? Then spiritual death renders him heedless of spiritual realities, of the presence of God, of the value of salvation, of the closeness of eternity. Does natural death appear in utter helplessness and powerlessness? So does spiritual death render a man incapable of spiritual action and exertion. Has natural death its essence in the entire separation it makes between ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... would sit just like that, and he and Jenny would sit near her for ever and ever. No mere abstractions like Time and Space could fill with emptiness the place where she now sat and smiled. In some mystical way eternity had breathed upon this hour and given it immortality. It had been suddenly touched with a wand into an enchanted permanence. Theosophists tell of an astral light, where every moment of time endures in strange paintings upon space. Isabel and Theophil and Jenny ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... of sunlight slowly move over the rough puncheon floor. The time passed infernally slowly for men waiting to test a hopeless hazard. By all logic the minutes should have been very precious and should have fairly flashed into eternity. The best we could reasonably wish for was death in combat, or self-inflicted. Yet we cursed the heat, the buzzing flies, the choking fumes of powder, the lack of water, and ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... thousands and thousands of stones, which, striking against each other, made the one dull, uniform sound, were all hurrying in one direction. It was like thinking on time, when the minute that now glides past is irrecoverable. So was it with these stones. The ocean is their eternity, and each note of that wild music told of one more ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... and if, by any means, some unbelievers thereby might be made to see that God is verily the living God now as ever, and might be stirred up to seek to be reconciled to Him by putting their trust in the atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ, and thus find in God a friend for time and eternity. ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, Fourth Part • George Mueller
... on the brink of eternity, and vast forces at whose nature men could only guess were sweeping planets and ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... that which is to come; for, if we engage eagerly in the affairs of life, we are apt to be totally forgetful of a future state; and, on the other hand, a steady contemplation of the awful concerns of eternity renders all objects here so insignificant, as to make us indifferent and negligent about them.' JOHNSON. 'Sir, Dr Cheyne has laid down a rule to himself on this subject, which should be imprinted on every mind: "To neglect nothing to secure my ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... the first of the kind I ever beheld. A civil, well behaved and much beloved young man, belonging to Captain Williams' company, was shot. He lived but about twelve hours, and died in great horror and agony of mind at the thought of going into eternity and appearing before his God and judge. He was from the north parish of New-London and had a wife ...
— An interesting journal of Abner Stocking of Chatham, Connecticut • Abner Stocking
... rejoice that the Almighty endowed my son with so much grace to behave himself in a manner to be so beloved and lamented. Soon do I hope to follow, and, being delivered from temporal miseries, to enjoy a blessed eternity with the ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... directness, and enterprise which enables them soon to make friends, and, almost before you have had time to look around, to start addressing you in the second person singular. Yet, while cementing such friendships for all eternity, almost always they begin quarrelling the same evening, since, throughout, they are a loquacious, dissipated, high-spirited, over-showy tribe. Indeed, at thirty-five Nozdrev was just what he had been an eighteen and twenty—he was just such a lover of fast living. ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... sweet entrancement, than the last. And still she who brought them, she who opened his eyes, who caused his ears to hear and his soul to see; she whom he worshipped; his heart's twin, she who had sworn herself to him on earth, and was there waiting to fulfil the oath to all eternity; the woman who had become a spirit, that spirit that had taken the shape of a woman—there she stood and smiled and changed, and yet was changeless. And oh! what did it matter if his life was draining from him, and oh! to die at those glittering feet, with that perfumed breath stirring ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... fantasms; but with men of flesh and blood, made altogether as we are. Had thou and I then been, who knows but we ourselves had taken refuge from an evil Time, and fled to dwell here, and meditate on an Eternity, in such fashion as we could? Alas, how like an old osseous fragment, a broken blackened shin-bone of the old dead Ages, this black ruin looks out, not yet covered by the soil; still indicating what a once gigantic Life lies buried there! It is dead now, and dumb; but was ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... were so young, so beautiful, So lonely, loving, helpless, and the hour Was that in which the Heart is always full, And, having o'er itself no further power, Prompts deeds Eternity can not annul, But pays off moments in an endless shower Of hell-fire—all prepared for people giving Pleasure or ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... is from eternity in respect of the eternal will and purpose (and it is chiefly in this that justice consists); although it is not eternal as regards its effect, since nothing ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... realized. What Napoleon dreamed, he labored to accomplish, and the monarchs of Europe trembled before him. What Howard wished to be, he labored to be; his ideal was beautiful and true, and he raised a throne which will endure through eternity. ...
— Now or Never - The Adventures of Bobby Bright • Oliver Optic
... and body of a child has the highest possible mission—the most sacred of all trusts. He must give it all his time and strength. He must lead its mind into green pastures; he must share its joys; he must know its hopes and fears; he must give it hold on lines of thought that reach into eternity, which will sooner or later flood it with inspiration; he must see that the brain has a sufficient foundation of flesh and blood and bone; he must give it all his life until the ...
— The Master of Silence • Irving Bacheller
... other people, but we keep more." Beloved, let us look out this day for spiritual pickpockets and spiritual leakage. Let us "lose nothing of what we have wrought, but receive a full reward"; and, as each day comes and goes, let us put away in the savings bank of eternity its treasures of grace and victory, and so be conscious from day to day that something real and everlasting is being ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... would wildly break away, seeking refuge either in the open street, or in his room at the old-time tavern, The Eagle House, "where," he would say, "I have lodged and boarded, I do solemnly asseverate, for a long, unbroken, middle-aged eternity of ten years, and can yet assert, in the words of the more fortunately-dying Webster, that 'I ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... battle against the truth. These weapons are dreaded by the spirit of evil more than all those iron implements of warfare on which man in his folly and blindness relies. The victories won by the Bible are lasting in this world, and not only in this world, but through eternity. ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... that life in which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, to excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back not least. But the average sermon flees the point, disporting itself in that eternity of which we know, and need to know, so little; avoiding the bright, crowded, and momentous fields of life where destiny awaits us. Upon the average book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to his ill-hap that when his own ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... alleviation of the sufferings of mankind,—have they been able to confine their vision more absolutely to the strictly useful? I fear they are worst offenders of all. For if the astronomer has set before us the infinite magnitude of space, and the practical eternity of the duration of the universe; if the physical and chemical philosophers have demonstrated the infinite minuteness of its constituent parts, and the practical eternity of matter and of force; and if both have alike proclaimed the universality of a definite and predicable order and succession ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley |
