We assert that “eternity” is not a soggy abstraction owned and operated by lazy thinkers and sentimental afterlife salesmen.

As evidence this isn’t the case, below we offer references to “eternity” by great thinkers, seers, and feelers. We will start with Marcus Aurelius: “Every moment of life is the last, every instant is eternity.”

The eternal is not distant, not in a somewhere else. It is here, now, in the depth of the present moment.
—Meister Eckhart

Perhaps the whole of eternity is in a single moment. Perhaps we have already lived forever and are only now noticing.
—Annie Dillard

Eternity is not the hereafter. This is it. If you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere.
—Joseph Campbell

Every moment is a golden one for those who have the vision to recognize it as such. Eternity is now.
—Myrtle Reed

Time brings all things to pass. But eternity is the standing still of the present now.
—Boethius

Every experience is worth having if it teaches us eternity lies in the moment.
—poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library where eternity is not duration but depth—every book opening onto all books.
—Jorge Luis Borges

The eternal dwells in each moment. The timeless pervades time.
—mystic Evelyn Underhill



This moment—this now—owns eternity. Every heartbeat is an entrance to forever.
—Anita Moorjani

Perhaps we are already in eternity, and what we call time is just eternity's way of experiencing itself sequentially.
—physicist Karen Barad

There are no ordinary moments. Each instant we inhabit contains all of eternity, if only we could learn to see it.
—philosopher Mary Midgley

Eternity is the infinite conversation between ourselves and the divine. Its minutes are immeasurable not because they are many, but because they are whole.
—Simone Weil

Eternity is not something that begins after you’re dead. It is going on all the time. We are in it now.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I caught a glimpse of eternity today. Not in a vision or revelation, but in the way light fell across the breakfast table, making everything suddenly significant, as if this ordinary Tuesday morning contained all time within its borders.
—Virginia Woolf

I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I've been knocking from the inside! Every moment is made of eternity, but we knock seeking entrance to what we already inhabit.
—Rumi, renderd by Coleman Barks

To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.
—William Blake (again, because he couldn’t shut up about it)

I felt eternity the other night when I heard the sea breathing beneath the mountain.
—poet Pablo Neruda

In every moment, the universe is beginning again. Past and future are both in this moment. This is the eternal now.
—philosopher J. Krishnamurti

Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time. We are in it now. Eternity is the ultimate reality of our lives. We are already in eternity; the trick is to notice.
—Alan Watts

In eternity, there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now.
—Henry David Thoreau

It is an eternity now. I am in the midst of it. Now is eternity. Now is the immortal life.
—Richard Jefferies