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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #eternity
Some foolish men declare that Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected. If god created the world, where was he before creation? If you say he was transcendent then, and needed no support, where is he now? No single being had the skill to make the world - for how can an immaterial god create that which is material? How could god have made the world without any raw material? If you say he made this first, and then the world, you are face with an endless regression. If you declare that the raw material arose naturally you fall into another fallacy, for the whole universe might thus have been its own creator, and have risen equally naturally. If god created the world by an act of will, without any raw material, then it is just his will made nothing else and who will believe this silly stuff? If he is ever perfect, and complete, how could the will to create have arisen in him? If, on the other hand, he is not perfect, he could no more create the universe than a potter could. If he is formless, actionless, and all-embracing, how could he have created the world? Such a soul, devoid of all modality, would have no desire to create anything. If you say that he created to no purpose, because it was his nature to do so then god is pointless. If he created in some kind of sport, it was the sport of a foolish child, leading to trouble. If he created out of love for living things and need of them he made the world; why did he not make creation wholly blissful, free from misfortune? Thus the doctrine that the world was created by god makes no sense at all. Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end. ↗
He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not ‘Who are you?’ but ‘So it was you all the time.’ All that they were and said at this meeting woke memories. The dim consciousness of friends about him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last explained; that central music in every pure experience which had always just evaded memory was now at last recovered...He saw not only Them; he saw Him. This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. What is blinding, suffocating fire to you is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a man. ↗
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule. Not William the Silent only, but all the considerable men I have known, and the most undiplomatic and unstrategic of these, forbore to babble of what they were creating and projecting. Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but hold thy tongue for one day: on the morrow, how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut out! Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman defined it, the art of concealing Thought; but of quite stifling and suspending Thought, so that there is none to conceal. Speech too is great, but not the greatest. As the Swiss Inscription says: Sprecfien ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden (Speech is silvern, Silence is golden); or as I might rather express it: Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity. ↗
Wilt thou go with me, sweet maid, Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me Through the valley-depths of shade, Of night and dark obscurity; Where the path has lost its way, Where the sun forgets the day, Where there's nor life nor light to see, Sweet maiden, wilt thou go with me! Where stones will turn to flooding streams, Where plains will rise like ocean waves, Where life will fade like visioned dreams And mountains darken into caves, Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me Through this sad non-identity, Where parents live and are forgot, And sisters live and know us not! Say, maiden; wilt thou go with me In this strange death of life to be, To live in death and be the same, Without this life or home or name, At once to be and not to be - That was and is not -yet to see Things pass like shadows, and the sky Above, below, around us lie? ↗
I mean, d'you know what eternity is? There's this big mountain, see, a mile high, at the end of the universe, and once every thousand years there's this little bird-" "What little bird?" said Aziraphale suspiciously. "This little bird I'm talking about. And every thousand years-" "The same bird every thousand years?" Crowley hesitated. "Yeah," he said. "Bloody ancient bird, then." "Okay. And every thousand years this bird flies-" "-limps-" "-flies all the way to this mountain and sharpens its beak-" "Hold on. You can't do that. Between here and the end of the universe there's loads of-" The angel waved a hand expansively, if a little unsteadily. "Loads of buggerall, dear boy." "But it gets there anyway," Crowley persevered. "How?" "It doesn't matter!" "It could use a space ship," said the angel. Crowley subsided a bit. "Yeah," he said. "If you like. Anyway, this bird-" "Only it is the end of the universe we're talking about," said Aziraphale. "So it'd have to be one of those space ships where your descendants are the ones who get out at the other end. You have to tell your descendants, you say, When you get to the Mountain, you've got to-" He hesitated. "What have they got to do?" "Sharpen its beak on the mountain," said Crowley. "And then it flies back-" "-in the space ship-" "And after a thousand years it goes and does it all again," said Crowley quickly. There was a moment of drunken silence. "Seems a lot of effort just to sharpen a beak," mused Aziraphale. "Listen," said Crowley urgently, "the point is that when the bird has worn the mountain down to nothing, right, then-" Aziraphale opened his mouth. Crowley just knew he was going to make some point about the relative hardness of birds' beaks and granite mountains, and plunged on quickly. "-then you still won't have finished watching The Sound of Music." Aziraphale froze. "And you'll enjoy it," Crowley said relentlessly. "You really will." "My dear boy-" "You won't have a choice." "Listen-" "Heaven has no taste." "Now-" "And not one single sushi restaurant." A look of pain crossed the angel's suddenly very serious face. ↗
A kiss! When all is said, what is a kiss? An oath of allegiance taken in closer proximity, a promise more precise, a seal on a confession, a rose-red dot upon the letter i in loving; a secret which elects the mouth for ear; an instant of eternity murmuring like a bee; balmy communion with a flavor of flowers; a fashion of inhaling each other's hearts, and of tasting, on the brink of the lips, each other's soul! ↗
