"Eternity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the crew seem to experience little inconvenience. It appears to me a miracle of miracles that our enormous bulk is not swallowed up at once and forever. We are surely doomed to hover continually upon the brink of Eternity, without taking a final plunge into the abyss. From billows a thousand times more stupendous than any I have ever seen, we glide away with the facility of the arrowy sea-gull; and the colossal waters rear their ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... it was impossible that her voice could reach him through the shouts of the sailors, the lowing and bleating of the cattle—he raised his head and looked in her direction. Their eyes met and were enchained for a moment, which seemed an eternity; then the blood flew to his face, leaving it the next moment paler than before. He swung round to the fat man by his side and clutched ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... that Jesus Christ, true God, begotten of the Father from eternity, and also true man, born of the Virgin Mary, is my Lord, who has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, secured and delivered me from all sins, from death and from the power of the devil; not with silver and gold, but with His holy and precious blood, and with ...
— The Lutherans of New York - Their Story and Their Problems • George Wenner
... Belle-Isle, to accomplish in his company that sad pilgrimage to the tomb of the giant he had so much loved, then to return to his dwelling to obey that secret influence which was conducting him to eternity by a mysterious road. But scarcely had his joyous servants dressed their master, whom they saw with pleasure preparing for a journey which might dissipate his melancholy; scarcely had the comte's gentlest horse been saddled and brought to the door, when the father of Raoul felt his head ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... prisoner; but we paroled him on the spot, and left him to those delicious sentiments which he must have felt in the arms of an elegant young woman, who had saved his life by an effort of love sufficient to endear her to him to all eternity. ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... easily enough of it,—five days! It was an eternity for a man in Daniel's state of mind. In three hours he had made all his preparations for his departure, arranged his business matters, and obtained a furlough for Lefloch, who was to go with him. At noon, therefore, ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... thought, thy hidden Face to find, Or tread the starry paths to the utmost verge of the sky? Nay, groping dull and blind Within the sheltering dimness of thy wings— Shade that their splendour flings Athwart Eternity— We, out of age-long wandering, but come Back to our Father's heart, where now ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... us foolish ones. Therefore they wait for the renewing of the 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 ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... and the duke of Alva was despatched with a large army to prove to the Hollanders that the Inquisition was the very best of all possible arrangements, and that it was infinitely better that a man should be burnt for half an hour in this world than for an eternity ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... burned so entirely that not even a bit of charcoal remained, the empress collected the ashes and scattered them to the winds, that they might be strewn over nine countries and seas, and not an atom find another atom through all eternity. ...
— Roumanian Fairy Tales • Various
... much civility, told us, that few of his numerous visitants gave that plain account of the phenomenon, shewing greater disposition to conjure up more difficult causes, and attribute the whole to the world's eternity: a notion not less contrary to found philosophy and common sense, than it is repugnant to faith, and the doctrines of Revelation; which prophesied long ago, that in the last days should come scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is now ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... there was a roar and a rush, and all were leaping forward to clear the second position. This was only accomplished after some desperately hard work and a quarter of an hour's hand-to-hand fighting—an eternity it seemed to those engaged—for the kopje was stubbornly held. But even Boer pluck, of which in this case there was no lack, could not resist the impetuous advance of the British infantry, and at last, when the hill-top was one crimson crown of blood and ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... meal. You were very kind to think of me and to send it, and you were extraordinarily understanding in the letter that you sent me. One's life out here is like a pollarded tree—all the lower branches are gone—one gazes on great nobilities, on the fascinating horror of Eternity sometimes—I said horror, but it's often fine in its spaciousness—one gazes on many inverted splendours of Titans, but it's giddy work being so high and rarefied, and all the gentle past seems gone. That's why it is pleasant in this grimy anonymity of death and courage to get reminders, ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... soon taught me to run it for myself. With him by my side I was as brave as a lion, and I took the corners and shaved eternity in a way to make him gasp. He said he had never been really scared in an automobile before, and he used to look at me with a ready-to-jump expression, as though I were a baby playing with a gun. You see, I had graduated on Lewis Wentz's steamer and a twenty-mile clip didn't feaze ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne
... heritage be yours; no truce nor trust 'Twixt theirs and ours, no union or accord Arise, unknown Avenger from our dust; With fire and steel upon the Dardan horde Mete out the measure of their crimes' reward. To-day, to-morrow, for eternity Fight, oft as ye are able—sword with sword, Shore with opposing shore, and sea with sea; Fight, Tyrians, all that are, and ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... heartless," she said, in a mocking tone. "You need dying consolation, I want to tell you, Guilliam, what was in my mind the night I left all for you. I did doubt you a little. That is where I sinned; but I shall only suffer for that through all eternity," she said, with a reckless laugh that chilled his soul. "But then, I hoped, I felt almost sure, you would marry me; and, oh, what a heaven of a home I purposed to make you! If you had only let even a magistrate say, 'I pronounce you man and wife,' I would ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... thirty-two days of this the brigade went out for sixteen days in divisional reserve. It was all so beautiful and soothing that it seemed as though the problem of perpetual motion had been solved and the war had come for an eternity. The enemy did the same thing, and we knew when he did it. He left us alone on relief days and we returned the compliment. Thus on December 9th we effected a peaceful passage into brigade reserve at Gorre Chateau. In a noisy sector ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off, And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark. Do not for ever with thy vailed lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust: Thou know'st 'tis common,—all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity. ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... strive to be glad that she, my angel-love, is so far removed from my unworthiness,— let her, if she be near me now, read my thoughts, and see in them how dear, how sacred is her fair and glorious memory,—how I would rather endure an eternity of anguish, than make her sad for one brief hour ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... either unconscious or only partly conscious. Now that the hour had come, they who had believed their courage secure felt it wither. They, the people with us, begged for a little longer time to brace themselves for the great crisis—the plunge into an eternity from which there would be no resurrection, neither of matter ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... rudder take a fresh grip on the water, and we were again safe until the next sea overtook us. And so it continued throughout the remaining hours of that dreadful night, with grim Death threatening me at every upward heave of the little craft, until at length—after what seemed to have been a very eternity of anxiety—the day broke slowly and sullenly ahead, by which time I had grown absolutely callous and indifferent. My nerves had been kept in a state of acute tension so long that they seemed to have become incapable of any further feeling of any kind, and ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... soul that wove the spell; Weeping with trailing wings beside his tomb? Or stretched and tortured on the racks of Hell Dark-scowling at the ministers of doom?— Peace! this is but a dream, there cannot be More suffering for him in Eternity! ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... got over all that. In eternity there is no bigotry. But what a pity that two fine boys like us should be kept apart by that awful spirit which prompts men to hate one another for the love of God, and to lie like slaves for ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... wither. May everything they set their hearts on rot. Send them pestilence, disease and every foul torture they have visited on Your people. Send the Angel of Death to rid the earth of them. May their souls burn in hell for all eternity. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... left of life was the ghastly progress of the law's ceremonial until he was brought to the scaffold and hanged amidst a whole nation's loathing. His eyes met Furneaux's in a glare of deadly malice. Then he looked into eternity with daring despair, and dived headlong over ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... many times repeated. In the middle of the room was a canopy, from which hung curtains of red brocaded stuff, and, under the canopy, an open coffin. 'That is where I sleep,' said Erik. 'One has to get used to everything in life, even to eternity.' The sight upset me so much that I ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... When, later in the battle, I stood by the crater of that mine and looked into its gulf I wondered how many Germans had been hurled into eternity when the earth had opened. The grave was big enough for a battalion of men with horses and wagons, below the chalk of the crater's lips. Often on the way to Bapaume I stepped off the road to look into that white gulf, remembering the moment when I saw the gust of flame ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... sought, and found in the antique; but, with the form, the spirit of the classical attitude towards life was revived. While the Church, like a careful mother, sought to lead her children, never allowed to grow up, safely from time into eternity, the men of the Renaissance felt that they had come of age, and that they were entitled to make themselves at home in this world. They wished to possess the earth and enjoy it by means of secular education and culture, and an impassable gulf yawned between their views ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... the thought of that brief punishment. His whole soul had been thrilled into immediate unreasoning belief in that eternity of vengeance where he, an undying hate, might clutch for ever an undying traitor, and hear that fair smiling hardness cry and moan with anguish. But the primary need and hope was to see a slow revenge under the same sky and on the same earth where he himself had ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... words to the Howards they were more struck than by anything else. During George Pelham's last stay with them he had talked frequently with Katharine upon deep philosophical questions, such as Time, Space, Eternity, and had pointed out to her how unsatisfactory the commonly-accepted solutions were. Then he had added the words of the communication almost textually, "I will solve those problems some day, Katharine." ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... that might have been noble,—all the years wasted that had gone before,—disappointed,—with nothing to hope for but time to work humbly and atone for the wrongs I had done. When I lay yonder, my soul on the coast of eternity, I resolved to atone for every selfish deed. I had no thought of happiness; God knows I had no hope of it. I had wronged you most: I could not die ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... 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 ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... the saintly Gerard to do with as he would for the advancement of his work. In 1118 Gerard died in extreme old age; "he died in the arms of the brothers, almost without sickness, falling, as it may be said, like a fruit ripe for eternity." ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... that the old king, the father of Bedr Basim, fell sick one day, whereupon his heart throbbed, and he felt that he was about to be removed to the mansion of eternity. Then his malady increased so that he was at the point of death. He therefore summoned his son, and charged him to take care of his subjects and his mother and all the lords of his empire and all the dependants. He also made them swear, ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... allowing a bank in which he happened to be president to do anything which should cause such a disturbance outside her home, when he knew she was so nervous. Not one word about the little step that had stood for an instant between her baby and eternity. Her husband reminded her gently how near their baby had come to death, and how she should rejoice that she was safe, but her reply had been a rush of tears, and "Oh, yes, you always think of the baby, never of me, ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... fingers strew O'er other lands some fleeting flowers, Lives, in blossoms ever new; Whence arose that shriek of pain? Whence the tear that flows in vain?— Death! thy unrelenting hand Tears some transient human band— Eternity! rich plant that blows Beneath a brighter, happier sky. Time is a fading branch, that grows On thy pure stem, and ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... deity who thinks and acts in him? and how can he have any sense of loyalty to a deity whom he cannot distinguish from himself? Nor do men generally demand so absolute a unity as is represented by pantheism. Such questions as those relating to the eternity of matter, the possibility of the existence of an immaterial being, and the mode in which such a being, if it exists, could act on matter, have not seemed practical to the majority of men. Man demands a method of ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... lines convey what Gray's ploughman is achieving for one evening, but not what the rude forefathers have achieved for eternity. From the ploughman and the simple annals of the poor the poem diverges to reproach the proud and great for their disregard of undistinguished merit, and moves on to praise of the sequestered life, and to an epitaph applicable either to a "poeta ignotus" or to Gray himself. The epitaph with its ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... could only be made to feel that every word, every action carries with it the weight of an eternity; that the merest chance may make something said or done quite unpremeditatedly, in vexation, sullenness, or spite, the last action, the last word; which may grow into an awful remembrance, rising up between them and the irredeemable past, and ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... pettiness with which so many mortals seem to content themselves. As the mood grew in intensity, this scorn of the lower things mixed with and gave place to a vivid insight into higher truths. The oppression began to give place to a realization of the eternity of the heroic things; the fatuities were seen as mere fashions; love was seen as the true lord of life; the eternal romance was evident in its glory; the naked strength and beauty of men were known despite their clothes. In such mood my work was produced; bitter protest ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... showing how their principles, though quite distinct, can mix and unite. The conventional form often superseded and effaced the naturalistic, and became the sign of an idea, or the hieroglyphic picture of a thing; immovable and unalterable in Egypt, where every effort was made to secure eternity on earth, but continually returning to naturalism in India, where the Aryan tendency, with the assistance of the "Code of Manu," always recurred to the restoration of the ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... which affects or works on will. A motive pulls me this way, another pulls me that; but in the end, my will follows one or the other. I can, then, do as I please. On the other hand, Infinite Knowledge must know, and have known from all eternity, what I shall do now, and at every moment of my future being: and for Omnipotence to know from all eternity what will be, is, in our human sense, practically undistinguishable from the thought that the Power has predestined ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... submarines will cut the thread which holds the English Damocles' sword over weak sea powers and that for eternity the "gruesome hands" of English despotism will be driven from ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... to another dream—the last. Suffocating and vague, the stillness waxed and ran over the troubled edges of eternity. The Plain, gloomy and implacable, was illuminated on its anonymous horizon by one rift of naked, leering light. Over its illimitable surface surged and shivered women, white, dazzling, numberless. As waves that, lap on lap, sweep fiercely across ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... itself, and evermore each path Is traced in suffering, and one footprint still Obliterates another; and we are all Vain shadows here that seem a little while, And suffer, and pass. Let me not fight in vain, O Son of God, with thine immortal word, Yon tyrant of eternity and time, Who doth usurp thy place on earth, whose feet Are in the depths, whose head is in the clouds, Who thunders all abroad, The world is mine! Laws, virtues, liberty I have attempted To give thee, Rome. Ah! only where death is ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... struck seven. Where could he be? The minutes seemed to drag into an eternity. All sorts of possibilities struck her, and then she ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... and tore at their clothing. Ordinarily all these petty annoyances would have 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
... perfections. From either the blind or the intelligent operation of this infinite Time, which bears but too near an affinity with the chaos of the Greeks, the two secondary but active principles of the universe, were from all eternity produced, Ormusd and Ahriman, each of them possessed of the powers of creation, but each disposed, by his invariable nature, to exercise them with different designs. [1002] The principle of good is eternally aborbed ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... his goods, and touching them with careful hands. He hovered over an ivory lady carrying an umbrella, and looked long at a white marble Buddha, who returned his look with an equally inscrutable regard. The Buddha sat cross-legged, thinking for ever and ever about eternity, and Mhtoon Pah moved round in red velvet toe-slippers, pattering lightly as he went, for in spite of his bulk Mhtoon Pah had an almost soundless walk. Having gone over everything and stood to count the silver bowls, he waited ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... I were with you to-day I would give you eighty-three kisses, one for each year you have lived. Eighty-three years seems very long to me. Does it seem long to you? I wonder how many years there will be in eternity. I am afraid I cannot think about so much time. I received the letter which you wrote to me last summer, and I thank you for it. I am staying in Boston now at the Institution for the Blind, but I have not commenced my studies yet, ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... An eternity between every step of Lord Nick. Others seemed to have sensed the meaning of this silent scene. People seemed to stand frozen in the midst of gestures. Or was that because Donnegan's own thoughts were traveling ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... to refuse admission to this supreme hope. As if in spite of herself, the former gladness—nay, a gladness multiplied beyond conception—reigned once more in her heart. Her grandfather would not speak lightly in such a matter as this; the meaning of his words was confessed, to all eternity immutable. Had it, then, come to this? The friend to whom she looked up with such reverence, with voiceless gratitude, when he condescended to speak kindly to her, the Peckovers' miserable little servant—he, ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... where the Almighty's form Glasses itself in tempests; in all time, Calm or convulsed—in breeze, or gale, or storm, Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime Dark-heaving;—boundless, endless and sublime— The image of Eternity—the throne Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime The monsters of the deep are made; each zone Obeys thee; thou goest forth, ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... high hope, of generous expectation, he went to Buffalo, and there, on the threshold of eternity, he delivered that memorable speech, worthy for its loftiness of tone, its blameless morality, its breadth of view, to be regarded as his testament to the nation. Through all his pride of country and his joy of its success runs the note of solemn warning, as in Kipling's noble ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... can say in truth that our beloved country is "the land of the free, and the home of the brave."—But this cannot be. I have heard my sentence passed, my doom is sealed. But two brief days between me and eternity. At the expiration of those two days, I shall stand upon the scaffold to take my last look at earthly scenes. But that scaffold has but little dread for me; for I honestly believe I am innocent of any crime ...
— 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
... perhaps, the English language, more terrible than the workings of an English railway-line. An instant before it seemed as though we were going to spend all eternity at Framlynghame Admiral, and now I was watching the tail of the train disappear round the curve of ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... her," said the landlady; "we can't let her soul go out into eternity not knowing, especially when I don't think it was all right about the child. You ought to go and tell ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... poet sighed. "I suppose you are partly right. Meteorology certainly has the advantage of humanity in some things. We cannot make much of age here, and hereafter we can only conceive of its being turned into youth. Fancy an eternity of sensibility!" ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... more laughable, than their accoutrements and grimaces were ridiculous. To judge from what they said, they belonged no longer to this world; all their thoughts were in heaven, and they considered themselves either on the borders of eternity or on the eve of the day of the Last Judgment. The truly devout Madame Napoleon spoke with rapture of martyrs and miracles, of the Mass and of the vespers, of Agnuses and relics of Christ her Saviour, and of Pius VII., His vicar. Had not her enthusiasm been interrupted ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... stains have been purified by fire, without suffering the penalty that my sins have deserved. But I have been told that the flames of purgatory where souls are burned for a time are just the same as the flames of hell where those who are damned burn through all eternity tell me, then, how can a soul awaking in purgatory at the moment of separation from this body be sure that she is not really in hell? how can she know that the flames that burn her and consume not will some day cease? For the torment she suffers is like that of the ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... masses who pierced the colossal stone cliffs of the Simplon, 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 ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... for who will account him otherwise, Qui iter adornat in occidentem, quum properaret in orientem? that goes backward all his life, westward, when he is bound to the east? or hold him a wise man (saith [434]Musculus) "that prefers momentary pleasures to eternity, that spends his master's goods in his absence, forthwith to be condemned for it?" Nequicquam sapit qui sibi non sapit, who will say that a sick man is wise, that eats and drinks to overthrow the temperature of his body? Can you account him wise or discreet that would willingly ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... Far otherwise. Are there not thousands of living witnesses to prove the falsity of this assertion; thousands who adorn the doctrine of God their Saviour, and whose 'motives to honorable effort' are higher than heaven and vast as eternity; thousands, who, though their enemies spare no efforts to crush them in the dust, and in despite of mountains of difficulties, rise up with a giant's strength to respectability and usefulness? 'No motive to honorable effort'! ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... remember—only desire;" in the divine time of his triumph in having scaled the heights to the palace, that sky-thing, with ramparts of air; above all, in the hour of his joy in the King's Alcove, when Olivia had looked in his eyes and touched his lips. Inexplicably as the way that eternity lies barely unrevealed in some kin-thing of its own—a shell, a duty, a vista—he suddenly felt it now in what the prince was saying. He listened, and for one poignant stab of time he knew that he touched hands with the elemental and ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... success. It is seen that the humble path of moral obedience issues in celestial heights of spiritual vision. Out of the noblest use of the Here and Now springs the assurance of a Hereafter and the sense of a present eternity. The way to the Highest is open, inviting, commanding. The simplest may enter, and the strongest must give his full strength to ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... answered this remonstrance with words of unlimited courtesy; expressing themselves "obliged to all eternity" for his services, and holding out vague hopes that the monies which he demanded on behalf of his troops should ere ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... only ten minutes beyond her usual time, but they seemed an eternity when I heard the ring and Burton's slow step. I could have bounded from my chair to open the door myself.—It was a telegram! How this always happens when one is expecting anyone with desperate anxiety—A ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... had spent so many hours in reading that holy and blessed book? No; for the promises of mercy and salvation which it held out to her was her only support through many hours of pain and suffering, when death seemed near, and eternity close at hand. Though too ill to read, or even to listen to the words of life, she could remember many of them in her heart, and think of them to her comfort in this season of trial. Sometimes she was able to talk to her mother for a few minutes, when it ...
— Aunt Harding's Keepsakes - The Two Bibles • Anonymous
... a possession and a belonging. It is the spiritual symbol which binds us to our heavenly lover for eternity just as the wedding ring is a pledge of fidelity for our earth time. It is only as we see it so, that we get the full beauty of the religion of Jesus. His church—the inner circle of his chosen ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... symbolic: you will see that the roots of this plant have burst through the vase. This recalls the famous definition of Hamlet's character in Wilhelm Meister. Here are the mystic rose, the flame, and the serpent, emblem of eternity. Some of the other symbols we have not yet been able ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... checking the years on my fingers that I am able to reckon the time of my birth. In the election booth, under a hard eye, I fumble the years and invite suspicion. Eighteen hundred and seventy-eight, I think it was. But even this salient fact—this milepost on my eternity—I remember most quickly by the recollection of a jack-knife acquired on my tenth birthday. By way of celebration on that day, having selected the longest blade, I cut the date—1888—in the kitchen woodwork with rather a pretty ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... It seemed an eternity till the men had gone; all the time Mark tried to believe this was one of the old dreams which had not visited him for so long, or, if he was really awake, that Caffyn must have got hold of something else—not that; he had had false alarms like this before, and ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... years, a thousand ages if you like, but forever? Out upon the monstrous idea! Let a man do evil every moment of his life, and let his life be the full threescore years and ten; shall there not come a period in the endless cycles of eternity when even his punishment shall end? What kind of a God is he whom your theologians have held up to us,—a God who creates us at his pleasure, without asking whether or not we wish to be created, who endows us with certain wild passions and capacities for evil, turns us loose into a world of suffering, ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... went on, but after the first lines the listener's brain was too troubled to attend. It was agitated with whirling memories of those earlier outcries throbbing with the passion of life, flaming records of the days when every instant held not an eternity of ennui, but of sensibility. "Red life boils in my veins.... Every woman is to me the gift of a world.... I hear a thousand nightingales.... I could eat all the elephants of Hindostan and pick my teeth with the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the speed that money could purchase? What should he say? What could he say, Mr. Carlton asked himself. To lose his own child would be a grief overwhelming enough; but to have given the order that hurried another man's only boy into eternity—that would be a tragedy that nothing could ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... day or an hour will bring forth. For many years one may be permitted to move on "the even tenor of his way," without anything of momentous import occurring to mark the passage of his little span of time as it sweeps him onward to eternity. At another period of life, events, it may be of the most startling and abidingly impressive nature, are crowded into a few months or weeks, or even days. So it was now with our travellers on the African river. When they reached the spot where they had dined, no one replied ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... This longing after immortality? Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror, Of falling into nought? Why shrinks the soul Back on herself, and startles at destruction? 'T is the divinity that stirs within us; 'T is heaven itself, that points out an hereafter, And intimates eternity to man. ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... orbs of phosphoric lightning the rays of suns extinguished, the splendours of vanished worlds, the glories of Olympus eclipsed—all seemed to have concentrated their reflections. When contemplating them one thought of eternity, and felt himself seized with a mighty giddiness, as though he were leaning over the ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... will live even as the monks live, will eat but before mid-day, will abstain from tobacco. There are no plays during Lent, and there are no marriages. It is the time for preparing the land for the crop; it is the time for preparing the soul for eternity. The congregations on the Sundays will be far greater at this time than at any other; there will be more thought of the ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... may be pretty nearly ascertained from the writings that are ascribed to that philosopher. He maintains in his physics, that "out of nothing there cannot possibly be produced any thing;—that material bodies must have existed from all eternity;—that the cause (lee, reason) or principle of things, must have had a co-existence with the things themselves;—that, therefore, this cause is also eternal, infinite, indestructible, without limits, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... him; she was thinking of her friend. She was thinking, as we all think, that those to whom in our suffering we turn for sympathy, become hallowed beings. Saints they may not be; but for want of a better name, saints they are to us, gracious and lovely presences. The great time Eternity, the great space Death, could not rob them of their saintship; for they were ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... which, at leisure intervals I looked a little into "Edwards on the Will," and "Priestley on Necessity." Under the circumstances, those books induced a salutary feeling. Gradually I slid into the persuasion that these troubles of mine, touching the scrivener, had been all predestinated from eternity, and Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose of an allwise Providence, which it was not for a mere mortal like me to fathom. Yes, Bartleby, stay there behind your screen, thought I; I shall persecute you no ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... and recognised him. This was a city missionary of the John Seaward type, who chanced to be fishing for souls that night in these troubled waters. There are many such fishermen about, thank God, doing their grand work unostentatiously, and not only rescuing souls for eternity, but helping, more perhaps than even the best informed are aware of, to save ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... courage, confidence, hope. Through this sand which was the wreck of countless geological ages, rushed life that was terrific and uplifting, too huge to include melancholy, too deep to betray itself in movement. Here was the stillness of eternity. Behind the spread grey masque of apparent death lay stores of accumulated life, ready to break forth at any point. In the Desert he felt himself ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... distributed through the universe finds here," I reflected, "a most instructive and conclusive demonstration. Robbed, by an adverse fate, of all that made life agreeable, this man, this pilgrim of time, this wayfarer to eternity, this companion of mine on the road of life, has had bestowed upon him an extraordinary solace, has been permitted to retain a commensurate satisfaction. Surely, life cannot have lost its attractions for one whose stomach still preserves such aspirations." And, prompted by the benevolence ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... whom, Antonietta, an admirably beautiful girl, later became Grand Duchess of Tuscany in her turn. Nothing indeed could have been more charming than the Naples of those days. I do not speak of that wondrous setting which will last to all eternity, but of the Naples of the Neapolitans, gay, noisy, and teeming with wit, as it was before the plague of politics fell on it, bringing divisions and gloom, and despoiling it of all its charm of originality; ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... temple for time and eternity, showing the divinely appointed elements of a good character (2 Peter 1:5-8), their sure foundations; the person and work of our Lord Jesus and the inspired Word of God; and their crowning bond, ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... individuality of every human being. A human being, according to her faith, was not the result of the presence and stamp of outward circumstances, but an original monad, with a certain special faculty, capable of a certain fixed development, and having a profound personal unity, which the ages of eternity might develop, but could not exhaust. I know not if she would have stated her faith in these terms, but some such conviction appeared in her constant endeavor to see and understand the germinal principle, the special ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... liberality—for he long ago ordered a fine to be levied upon those who called a Christian a dog; and in his dominions the prejudice is so great that a Christian must be a degraded being. A residence in Turkey might be profitable to those Christians who patronize the eternity of prejudice; it would afford an opportunity of testing the goodness of the rule, by showing how it ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... to rest for a moment or two with her hand on the edge of the boat, breathing deeply, before she went down again. Losing sight of her among the under-water caves one day, I waited for what seemed an eternity. I cannot say how long she was gone, for as the time lengthened seconds became minutes and hours, while I was torn between diving after her and remaining ready for emergency in the boat. When at ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... with the soul's virgin kiss. Her lips had kissed many times before, but her soul never. How long it lasted, that sweet perturbation, that fervent experience of a touch, neither, I suppose, ever knew; for at such times a moment is an eternity. As a lightning flash in a dark night reveals, for a dazzling instant, a world concealed before, so the electric interchange of two hearts charged with love's lightning seems to open the very doors of infinity; and it is the glory of heaven ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... to Sumi's proposal, but Neangir objected strongly. 'If Sumi leaves us,' he said to his father, 'I shall not see my beloved Argentine when she returns to-night with the fair Aurora. And life is an eternity till I ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various
... stillness. Kirilov and his wife were silent and not weeping, as though besides the bitterness of their loss they were conscious, too, of all the tragedy of their position; just as once their youth had passed away, so now together with this boy their right to have children had gone for ever to all eternity! The doctor was forty-four, his hair was grey and he looked like an old man; his faded and invalid wife was thirty-five. Andrey was not merely the only child, but also the ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... to the lie again? She died, telling me that she died for me. She died, having written to Reanda that she died for him. I do not judge her. God will. But God Himself could not make me love the smallest shadow of her memory. It is impossible. I am beyond life. I am outside it. My eternity ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... what a blessed thing it is to be saved, to go to heaven, to be made like angels, and to dwell with God and Christ to all eternity. ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... accents and reechoes: "it is lawful," or "it is not lawful." Or, to use another simile, conscience is the compass by which we steer aright our moral lives towards the haven of our souls' destination in eternity. But just as behind the mariner's compass is the great unseen power, called attraction, under whose influence the needle points to the star; so does the will or Law of God control the action of the conscience, and direct it faithfully towards ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... 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
... for one expressive of deep-felt joy. Raymond encircled her waist with his arm, and continued, "I do not deny that I have balanced between you and the highest hope that mortal men can entertain; but I do so no longer. Take me—mould me to your will, possess my heart and soul to all eternity. If you refuse to contribute to my happiness, I quit England to-night, and will never ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... a fellow-cratur live to a' eternity ohn been ashamed o' sic a thing 's that? Wad that be to wuss him weel? Kenna ye 'at the mair shame the mair grace? My word was the best beginnin' o' better 'at I cud wuss him. Na, na, laddie! frae my verra hert, ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... the dreary portal, Phantom-shapes, the guards of Hades, lie; None of heavenly kind, nor yet of mortal, May unchallenged pass the warders by. None that path may go, If he cannot show His last passport to eternity." ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... none more curious than the nascence of curiosity itself, nothing to compare with the dawning of consciousness in the ancient dark and the gradual extension of psychic life and illumination throughout a cosmos that before had only been. An eternity of blindly acting, transforming, unconscious existence, assuming at length, through the birth of sense and intellect, without loss or break of continuity, the abiding form of fleeting time." (C. J. Keyser, ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... than anything—more than the few words of farewell, the cold handshake, and the slam of the hall door half-an-hour ago. "Was it only half-an-hour?" she murmurs, staring stupidly at the clock; "it seems an eternity! And now he is going farther and farther from me, never to return—never to tease, and praise and love me, for (she sobs) he did love me once, in spite of everything—never to laugh at me and call me 'little woman'—never to hold my hand or ask my help ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... glancing at the bed and the table and the ricketty washstand. There were pictures and framed mottoes on the walls. Over his bed was a large motto-card, framed in stained deal, bearing the word: ETERNITY; and on the opposite wall, placed so that he should see it immediately he awoke, was a coloured picture of Daniel in the Lions' Den, in which the lions seemed to be more dejected ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... conveniently; but just that right touch of craziness that Nobel had in mind, and that goes with great experiment of spirit—the chill, Nietzsche-like wildness, that bravado before God and man and before Time, that swinging one's self out on Eternity, which make Upward a typical man of genius, would have been lacking. K—— (whose criticisms of books are the most creative ones I know) said of Upward's book that he felt very happy and strangely emancipated when he read it, but that ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... to begin the great work of laying the foundation of the Mystical Temple of God; to St. John, the other of the two, was allotted the task of perfecting what had been begun, so that a sure and steady basis should not be wanting on which the New Jerusalem might rise through time to eternity[1]. ...
— A Key to the Knowledge of Church History (Ancient) • John Henry Blunt
... disqualification for high preferment, if not for holy orders? Look at the questions which Archbishop Whitgift propounded to Barret, questions framed in the very spirit of William Huntington, S. S. [One question was, whether God had from eternity reprobated certain persons; and why? The answer which contented the Archbishop was "Affirmative, et quia voluit."] And then look at the eighty-seven questions which Bishop Marsh, within our own memory, propounded to candidates for ordination. We should be loth ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... change had come over him while she was speaking. It was only for the moment, and yet to him it was an eternity. It might, as she said, have been the want of sleep, for insomnia plays strange tricks sometimes with ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... Arthurian than anything in The Idylls of the King. There are other elements; especially that sacred thing that can perhaps be called Anachronism. All that to us is Anachronism was to mediaevals merely Eternity. But the main excellence of the Mumming Play lies still, I think, in its uproarious secrecy. If we cannot hide our hearts in healthy darkness, at least we can hide our faces in healthy blacking. If you cannot ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... essentially vain; that the one worthy object of investigation is the problem of ethical life; and his example was followed by the Cynics and the later Stoics. Even the comprehensive knowledge and the penetrating intellect of Aristotle failed to suggest to him that in holding the eternity of the world, within its present range of mutation, he was making a retrogressive step. The scientific heritage of Heracleitus passed into the hands neither of Plato nor of Aristotle, but into those of ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... 'the gospel of the glory of God,' leads up to that great thought that the true glory of the divine nature is its tenderness. The lowliness and death of Christ are the glory of God! Not in the awful attributes which separate that inconceivable Nature from us, not in the eternity of His existence, nor in the Infinitude of His Being, not in the Omnipotence of His unwearied arm, nor in fire-eyed Omniscience, but in the pity and graciousness which bend lovingly over us, is the true glory ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... was once a monk," went on the other. "I am what you would call an escaped monk. Yes, I have escaped into eternity. But the monks held one truth at least, that the highest life should be without possessions. I have no pocket money and no pockets, and all the stars are ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... morning.... But perhaps it may be the morning. Would you believe it, I dined here to-day only to avoid dining with the old man, I loathe him so. I should have left long ago, so far as he is concerned. But why are you so worried about my going away? We've plenty of time before I go, an eternity!" ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... for day-dreams. Now and then he could have seen the Solway gleaming, and I can imagine how the beautiful, winding river must have given that grave, wise boy thoughts of the great river of life, running to and from eternity. We passed close to Hoddam Hill, where—Sir S. and Mrs. James told me—the Carlyle family lived for a while when Thomas was grown up, he translating German romances, and his brother working ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... went, having swept thousands of souls into eternity, and hundreds of thousands of pounds into nonentity. Lifeboats had not been invented. Harbours of refuge were almost unknown, and although our coasts bristled with dangerous reefs and headlands, lighthouses ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... rock shelter to another. The carriage drove through a vast plain, rimmed with far-away mountains, red as porphyry, but fading to purple at the horizon. Victoria felt that she would never come to the end of this plain, that it must finish only with eternity; and she wished in an occasional burst of impatience that she were travelling in Nevill Caird's motor-car. She could reach her sister in a third of the time! She told herself that these thoughts were ungrateful to Maieddine, who was doing so much for her sake, and she kept ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... left open to us, since large military stores were being continually brought in by the British from the coast. We honestly regretted that, owing to the derailment and destruction of trains, drivers, stokers, and often innocent passengers were launched into eternity. War is at best a cruel and illogical way of settling disputes, and the measures which the belligerent parties are sometimes compelled to take are of such a character that sentimentality does not enter into any of the calculations of the ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... unparalleled obduracy has gained one point; it was my intention to have ordered you for execution tomorrow at the hour of twelve o'clock; but, as a Christian man, I could not think for a moment of hurrying you into eternity in your present state. The sentence of the court then is that you be taken from the dock in which you now stand to the prison from whence you came, and that from thence you be brought to the place of execution on next Saturday, and ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... manhood less because man's face is black? Let thunders of the loosened seals reply! Who shall the rider's restive steed turn back, Or who withstand the arrows he lets fly Between the mountains of eternity? Genius ride forth! Thou gift and torch of heav'n! The mastery is kindled in thine eye; To conquest ride! thy bow of strength is giv'n— The trampled hordes of caste before thee shall ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... a sharp blow in the stomach. As though his legs were putty, he rolled off the rock. His ears buzzed... Then darkness ... silence ... eternity.... ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... satisfied man as a whole, and accounted for him in his essential nature. Further, He saw well enough that the failure of Christianity to unite all men one to another rested not upon its feebleness but its strength; its lines met in eternity, not in time. Besides, ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... left him by his father and his grandfather. Finally, going to Ascoli as architect under Pope Paul III, he had his throat cut one night by one of his servants, who came to rob him. And thus the family of Lorenzo became extinct, but not so his fame, which will live to all eternity. ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... Carlyle a poet, taught the same truth. They were both witnesses to the presence of God in the spirit of man, and looked at this life in the light of another and a higher; or rather, they penetrated through the husk of time and saw that eternity is even here, a tranquil element underlying the noisy antagonisms of man's earthly life. Both of them, like Plato's philosopher, made their home in the sunlight of ideal truth: they were not denizens of the cave taking the things of sense for ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... be kept in check those sins of self-will, conceit, self-indulgence, which beset all free and prosperous men. Here must be practised virtues which (if not the very highest) are yet virtues still, and will be such to all eternity. ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... that seeming great beyond the power 10 Of growth, yet seemeth ever more to grow, Could I transmute the whole to one rich Dower Of Happy Life, and give it all to Thee, Thy lot, methinks, were Heaven, thy age, Eternity! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Soul? But take the question, and think of it for yourself, formulating thus: Supposing both to be equally happy, is one hour more desirable than one year? From that then advance to the final inquiry, what are threescore and ten years on earth to all eternity with God? By-and-by, son of Hur, thinking in such manner, you will be filled with the meaning of the fact I present you next, to me the most amazing of all events, and in its effects the most sorrowful; it ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... say, if God sees all beforn, Godde may not deceived be, pardie! Then must it fallen,* though men had it sworn, *befall, happen That purveyance hath seen before to be; Wherefore I say, that from etern* if he *eternity Hath wist* before our thought eke as our deed, *known We have no free choice, as these ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer |
