Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Eternity
Eternity! thou pleasing dreadful thought!
Through what variety of untried being,
Through what new scenes and changes must we pass!
Addison—Cato. Act V. Sc. 1.
Then gazing up ’mid the dim pillars high,
The foliaged marble forest where ye lie,
Hush, ye will say, it is eternity!
This is the glimmering verge of heaven, and there
The columns of the heavenly palaces.
Matthew Arnold—The Tomb.
The created world is but a small parenthesis in eternity.
Sir Thomas Browne—Works. Bohn’s ed. Vol. III. P. 143.
Eternity forbids thee to forget.
Byron—Lara. Canto I. St. 23.
Vain, weak-built isthmus, which dost proudly rise
Up between two eternities!
Cowley—Ode on Life and Fame. L. 18.
Nothing is there to come, and nothing past,
But an eternal Now does always last.
Cowley—Davideis. Bk. I. L. 360.
Eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is as a short parenthesis in a long period.
Donne—Book of Devotions. Meditation 14. (1624).
Summarum summa est æternum.
The sum total of all sums total is eternal (meaning the universe).
Lucretius—De Rerum Natura. III. 817. Also Bk. V. 362.
That golden key,
That opes the palace of eternity.
Milton—Comus. L. 13.
(Eternity) a moment standing still for ever.
James Montgomery.
This speck of life in time’s great wilderness
This narrow isthmus ’twixt two boundless seas,
The past, the future, two eternities!
Moore—Lalla Rookh. The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan. St. 42.
Those spacious regions where our fancies roam,
Pain’d by the past, expecting ills to come,
In some dread moment, by the fates assign’d,
Shall pass away, nor leave a rack behind;
And Time’s revolving wheels shall lose at last
The speed that spins the future and the past:
And, sovereign of an undisputed throne,
Awful eternity shall reign alone.
Petrarch—Triumph of Eternity. L. 102.
The time will come when every change shall cease,
This quick revolving wheel shall rest in peace:
No summer then shall glow, nor winter freeze;
Nothing shall be to come, and nothing past,
But an eternal now shall ever last.
Petrarch—Triumph of Eternity. L. 117.
Was man von der Minute ausgeschlagen
Gibt keine Ewigkeit zurück.
Eternity gives nothing back of what one leaves out of the minutes.
Schiller—Resignation. St. 18.
The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame
Over his living head like Heaven is bent,
An early but enduring monument,
Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
In sorrow.
Shelley—Adonais. XXX.
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.
Shelley—Adonais. LII.
In time there is no present,
In eternity no future,
In eternity no past.
Tennyson—The “How” and “Why.”
And can eternity belong to me,
Poor pensioner on the bounties of an hour?
Young—Night Thoughts. Night I. L. 66.