Inspirational Quotes on Eternity

“Let the Kingdom be always before you, and believe with certainty and consistency the things that are yet unseen. Let nothing that is on this side of eternal life get inside you.”

“It takes a purely human courage to renounce the whole temporal realm in order to gain eternity, but this I do gain and in all eternity can never renounce—it is a self-contradiction. But it takes a paradoxical and humble courage to grasp the whole temporal realm now by virtue of the absurd, and this is the courage of faith.”

“The Eternal may meet us in what is, by our present measurements, a day, or (more likely) a minute or a second; but we have touched what is not in any way commensurable with lengths of time, whether long or short. Hence our hope finally to emerge, if not altogether from time (that might not suit our humanity) at any rate from the tyranny, the unilinear poverty, of time, to ride it not to be ridden by it, and so to cure that always aching wound ('the wound man was born for') which mere succession and mutability inflict on us, almost equally when we are happy and when we are unhappy. For we are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. 'How he's grown!' we exclaim, 'How time flies!' as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the very wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed: unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal.”

“Death is not your termination but your transition into eternity, so there are eternal consequences to everything you do on earth. Every act of our lives strikes some chord that will vibrate in eternity.”

“One life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us for evermore!”

“When the author walks on the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right - something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise. It will be too late then to choose your side.”

“Time is given us to use in view of eternity.”

“But at length, O God, will you not cast Death and Hell into the lake of Fire - even into your own consuming self? Death shall then die everlastingly. ... Then indeed will you be all in all. For then our poor brothers and sisters, every one - O God, we trust in you, the Consuming Fire - shall have been burnt clean and brought home. For if their moans, myriads of ages away, would turn heaven for us into hell - shall a man be more merciful than God? Shall, of all His glories, His mercy alone not be infinite? Shall a brother love a brother more than The Father loves a son? - more than The Brother Christ loves His brother? Would He not die yet again to save one brother more?”

“Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present, and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabits.”

“Why would God provide heaven on earth when he's planned the real thing for you in eternity?”

“Dream of yoking a gnat with an archangel, and then imagine that you can help your Lord in the work of salvation.”

“The secret prayer chamber is a bloody battleground. Here violent and decisive battles are fought out. Here the fate of souls for time and eternity is determined, in quietude and solitude.”

“We must meet the uncertainties of this world with the certainty of the world to come.”

“There's not a single thing on offer in this all-too-temporary world for which you should ever sell your soul.”

“I know what Eternity is, though I cannot define the word to satisfy a metaphysician. The little child taught by some grandmother Lois, in a cottage, knows what she means when she tells him "you will live forever," though both scholar and teacher would be puzzled to put it into other words.”

“Transiency is stamped on all our possessions, occupations, and delights. We have the hunger for eternity in our souls, the thought of eternity in our hearts, the destination for eternity written on our inmost being, and the need to ally ourselves with eternity proclaimed by the most short-lived trifles of time. Either these things will be the blessing or the curse of our lives. Which do yon mean that they shall be for you?”

“I never was without without some religious principles. I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the Deity; that He made the world, and governed it by His Providence; that the most acceptable service of God was the doing good to man; that our souls are immortal; and that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded, either here or hereafter.”

“A man may lose the good things of this life against his will; but if he loses the eternal blessings, he does so with his own consent.”

“They, then, who are destined to die, need not be careful to inquire what death they are to die, but into what place death will usher them.”

“Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever.”