“The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.”

—  George Eliot

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 563

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we…" by George Eliot?
George Eliot photo
George Eliot 300
English novelist, journalist and translator 1819–1880

Related quotes

Robert Hunter photo

“Nothing's for certain, It could always go wrong, Come in when it's raining, Go on out when it's gone, We could have us a high time, Living the good life, Well I know”

Robert Hunter (1941–2019) American musician

"High Time"
Song lyrics, (1970)

Mary Baker Eddy photo

“When angels visit us, we do not hear the rustle of wings, nor feel the feathery touch of the breast of a dove; but we know their presence by the love they create in our hearts.”

Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) religious leader

Source: Poems by Mary Baker Eddy

Epicurus photo

“Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”

Epicurus Letter to Menoeceus

“Golden hours of vision come to us in this present life, when we are at our best, and our faculties work together in harmony.”

Charles Fletcher Dole (1845–1927) Unitarian minister, speaker, and writer

The Hope of Immortality (Ingersoll Lecture, 1906).

“And so with us, she thought. We come, we go, and, as individuals, we are forgotten. But the stream of human life goes on, ever changing, but ever the same, and as the stream is fed by well-springs hoarded by Nature so the stream of humanity is fed by the store of accumulated wisdom and effort and hard-won experience of past generations.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

Concluding paragraph to novel
Still Glides the Stream

Sherrilyn Kenyon photo

“When everything else falls down around us, just knowing that there's another person who will miss us when we're gone is enough to see us through our darkest moments.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist
Martin Buber photo

“When we rise out of [the night] into the new life and there begin to receive the signs, what can we know of that which — of him who gives them to us? Only what we experience from time to time from the signs themselves. If we name the speaker of this speech God, then it is always the God of a moment, a moment God.”

Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian

Between Man and Man (1965), p. 15
Between Man and Man (1965)

Kellyanne Conway photo

“You can't appeal to us through our wombs, we're pro-life. The fetus beat us. We grew up with sonograms. We know life when we see it.”

Kellyanne Conway (1967) American strategist and pollster

In the Land of Conservative Women http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/09/in-the-land-of-conservative-women/376667/ (September 1996)

Fernando Pessoa photo

“Let's be simple and calm,
Like the trees and streams,
And God will love us, making us
Us, even as the trees are trees
And the streams are streams,
And will give us greenness in the spring, which is its season,
And a river to go to when we end…
And he'll give us nothing more, since to give us more would make us less us.”

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher

Sejamos simples e calmos,
Como os regatos e as árvores,
E Deus amar-nos-á fazendo de nós
Belos como as árvores e os regatos,
E dar-nos-á verdor na sua primavera,
E um rio aonde ir ter quando acabemos...
E não nos dará mais nada, porque dar-nos mais seria tirar-nos mais.
Alberto Caeiro (heteronym), O Guardador de Rebanhos ("The Keeper of Sheep"), VI — in A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, trans. Richard Zenith (Penguin, 2006)

Thich Nhat Hanh photo

“The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Variant: Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.

Related topics