Pliny the Elder Quotes

The world and that which, by another name, men have thought good to call Heaven (under the compass of which all things are covered), we ought to believe, in all reason, to be a divine power, eternal, immense, without beginning, and never to perish.

I don't think of God as an old white man with no belly button, nor even an old black woman with no belly button. But I agree that God is something eternal. Something cannot come out of nothing. I believe God is Everything. And I believe in infinity.

Silence! coeval with eternity! thou wert ere Nature's self began to be; thine was the sway ere heaven was formed on earth, ere fruitful thought conceived creation's birth.

We live our little life; but Heaven is above us and all around and close to us; and Eternity is before us and behind us; and suns and stars are silent witnesses and watchers over us. We are enfolded by Infinity.

Creation is all space, all time - all things past, present, and future.

To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.

The greatest miracle of all time, without any close seconds, is the universe. It is the miracle of all miracles, one that ineluctably points with the combined brightness of every star to something - or Someone - beyond itself.

There are times in the history of men and nations, when they stand so near the vale that separates mortals from the immortals, time from eternity, and men from their God, that they can almost hear the beatings, and feel the pulsations of the heart of the Infinite.

This universe is the wreckage of the infinite on the shores of the finite.

Earth and high heaven are fixed of old and founded strong.

Heaven is beyond our imagination . . . . At our most creative moment, at our deepest thought, at our highest level, we still cannot fathom eternity.

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.

What reason have atheists for saying that we cannot rise again? That what has never been, should be, or that what has been, should be again? Is it more difficult to come into being than to return to it.

O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it?

Men and women were created for something great, for infinity. Nothing else will ever be enough.

But the universe is infinite.

Every infinity... is made finite to God.

What canst thou see elsewhere which thou canst not see here? Behold the heaven and the earth and all the elements; for of these are all things created.

It must be so,-Plato, thou reasonest well! Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, This longing after immortality? Or whence this secret dread and inward horror Of falling into naught? 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. Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought!

What is death but a traversing of eternities and a crossing of cosmic oceans?

I saw Eternity the other night, Like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright, And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years, Driven by the spheres, Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world And all her train were hurled.

From every spot on earth we are equally near heaven and the infinite.

I am firmly convinced that there is life after death, not in a primitive sense but as the entry of my completely finite person into God's infinity, as a transition into another reality beyond the dimension of space and time that pure reason can neither affirm nor deny.

eternity is a depth which no geometry can measure, no arithmetic calculate, no imagination conceive, no rhetoric describe.