YourDictionary

eternal quotes

  • Eternal Passion! Eternal Pain!

    - Matthew Arnold
      Poems:  A New Edition,'Philomela', l.31^2.

  • The eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness.

    - Matthew Arnold
      Literature and Dogma, ch.8.

  • Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity. There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thumbprint nowhere set against our souls, would not commit rape, murder and all abominations.

    - Djuna Barnes
      Doctor. Nightwood, ch.5.

  • The jazz band can be used for artificial excitement and aphrodisiac purposes, but not for spreading eternal truths.

    - SirArthur Bliss
      'Music Policy'.

  • Jedes geeinzelte Du ist ein Durchblick zu ihm. Durch jedes geeinzelte Du spricht das Grundwort das Ewige an. Every particularThou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou; by means of every particularThou the primary word addresses the eternal Thou. 164

    - Martin Buber
      Ich und Du (translated by R G Smith as I and Thou,1936).

  • L'Ide  e seule est e  ternelle et ne  cessaire. The idea alone is eternal and necessary.

    - Gustave Flaubert
      Letter to Mme Louise Colet, 9  Aug.

  • Le charme de la nouveaute  , peu a'   peu tombant comme un ve" t ement, laissait voir a'   nu l'e  ternelle monotonie de la passion, qui a toujours les me"  mes formes et le me"  me langage. The charm of novelty, falling little by little like a robe, revealed the eternal monotony of passion, which has always the same forms and the same language.

    - Gustave Flaubert
      Madame Bovary, pt.2, ch.12.

  • Pity the poor creatures in warmer countries where the seasons never change.Where summer is eternal and they never know the pain of waiting and the joy at last when summer comes.

    - Ray Guy
      That Far Greater Bay,'Catching Conners'.

  • All women's dresses, in every age and country, are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.

    -LinYutang
      In the Ladies Home Journal.

  • His trust was with the eternal to be deemed Equal in strength, and rather than be less Cared not to be at all; with that care lost Went all his fear.

    -John Milton
      Of Moloch. Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.2, l.46^9.

  • But say That death be not one stroke, as I supposed, Bereaving sense, but endless misery From this day onward, which I feel begun Both in me, and without me, and so last To perpetuity; ay me, that fear Comes thund'ring back with dreadful revolution On my defenceless head; both Death and I Am found eternal, and incorporate both, Nor I on my part single, in me all Paradise Lost Posterity stands cursed: fair patrimony That I must leave ye, sons; O were I able To waste it all myself, and leave ye none!

    -John Milton
       Adam muses on death. Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.10, l.808^20.

  • I sometimes think the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

    - George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair Orwell
      The Road to Wigan Pier, ch.4.

  • If the war didn't happen to kill you it was bound to start you thinking. After that unspeakable idiotic mess you couldn't go on regarding society as something eternal and unquestionable, like a pyramid.You knew it was just a balls-up. 628

    - George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair Orwell
      Coming Up For Air, pt.2, ch.8.

  • Whatever mourns when many leave these shores: Whatever shares The eternal reciprocity of tears.

    -Wilfred Owen
      'Insensibility', collected in Poems (published1920).

  • We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies.Our interests are eternal, and it is our duty to follow them.

    - HenryJohnTemple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
      Speech, House of Commons,1 Mar.

  • Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never Is, but alwaysTo be blest.

    - Alexander Pope
      An Essay on Man, epistle1, l.95^6.

  • Oh Happiness! our being's end and aim! Good, pleasure, ease, content! whate'er thy name: That something still which prompts th'eternal sigh, For which we bear to live, or dare to die.

    - Alexander Pope
      An Essay on Man, epistle 4, l.1^4.

  • If ever I utter an oath again may my soul be blasted to eternal damnation!

    - George Bernard Shaw
      Captain La Hire. Saint  Joan, sc.2.

  •    He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead; Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the Eternal.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
    Adonais, stanza 38.

  • The longest day must have its close,the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning. An eternal, inexorable lapse of moments is ever hurrying the day of the evil to aneternal night, andthenightofthejusttoaneternalday.

    - Harriet (Elizabeth) ne  e Beecher Stowe
      UncleTom's Cabin, ch.40.

  • I grow in worth, and wit, and sense, Unboding critic-pen, Or that eternal want of pence, Which vexes public men.

    -Tennyson
      Poems,'WillWaterproof's Lyrical Monologue', stanza 6, l.41^4.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Learn more about eternal

link/cite print suggestion box