Quotes about forever
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Eugene O'Neill photo

“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.”

Page 63 (Act 2, Scene 1)
Long Day's Journey into Night (1955)
Source: Long Day's Journey Into Night
Context: But I suppose life has made him like that, and he can't help it. None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever.

Mark Twain photo
Nicholas Sparks photo
Laurie Halse Anderson photo
Paulo Coelho photo

“Sadness does not last forever when we walk in the direction of that which we always desired.”

Variant: Sorrows do not last forever when we are journeying towards the thing we have always wanted.
Source: The Fifth Mountain

Alexandre Dumas photo
Carlos Ruiz Zafón photo

“The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.”

Variant: Someone once said that the moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.
Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin photo

“We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other.”

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881–1955) French philosopher and Jesuit priest

Variant: We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate one another.

Lois Lowry photo
Richard Branson photo

“The brave may not live forever – But the cautious do not live at all”

Richard Branson (1950) English business magnate, investor and philanthropist

Source: Like a Virgin: Secrets They Won't Teach You at Business School

Rabindranath Tagore photo

“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Attributed to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973) Energy reorganization act of 1973: Hearings, Ninety-third Congress, first session, on H.R. 11510. p. 248
1970s
Variant: Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.

“Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.”

M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) American psychiatrist

Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

Suzanne Collins photo

“I wish I could freeze this moment, right here, right now, and live in it forever.”

Peeta Mellark to Katniss, p. 245
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, Catching Fire (2009)

Paul Simon photo
Andy Andrews photo
Nicholas Sparks photo
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings photo
Jim Butcher photo
Eleanor Roosevelt photo
Daniel H. Wilson photo

“Memories fade but words hang around forever.”

Source: Robopocalypse

Stephen King photo
Albert Einstein photo

“But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Earliest source located is the book Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists by Robert Jungk (1958), p. 249, which says that Einstein made the comment during "a walk with Ernst Straus, a young mathematician acting as his scientific assistant at Princeton."
Variant: "Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity." From A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking (2005), p. 144 http://books.google.com/books?id=4Y0ZBW19n_YC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA144#v=onepage&q&f=false.
Earlier, Straus recalled the German version of the quote in Helle Zeit, Dunkle Zeit: In Memoriam Albert Einstein (1956) edited by Carl Seelig<!-- Zurich: Europa Verlag -->, p. 71. There the quote was given as Ja, so muß man seine Zeit zwischen der Politik und unseren Gleichungen teilen. Aber unsere Gleichungen sind mir doch viel wichtiger; denn die Politik ist für die Gegenwart da, aber solch eine Gleichung is etwas für die Ewigkeit.
Attributed in posthumous publications
Context: Yes, we now have to divide up our time like that, between politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever.

Emil M. Cioran photo
Cassandra Clare photo

“Aren't we forever?”

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Diana Gabaldon photo
Laurie Halse Anderson photo
Henry Miller photo
Terry Pratchett photo

“Nothing has to be true forever. Just for long enough.”

Source: The Truth

Bruce Lee photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo
Ludwig Van Beethoven photo
George Santayana photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Tamora Pierce photo
Juan Rulfo photo
Alice Munro photo
Vladimir Nabokov photo
Leonardo Da Vinci photo

“once you have tasted the taste of sky, you will forever look up”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Source: Leonardo on Painting: An Anthology of Writings by Leonardo Da Vinci with a Selection of Documents Relating to His Career

James Joyce photo
Bruce Lee photo
Haruki Murakami photo
Alexandre Dumas photo
Nicholas Sparks photo
Rabindranath Tagore photo
Will Durant photo
Francois Mauriac photo
Orison Swett Marden photo
Joanne K. Rowling photo

“The stories we love best do live in us forever. So, whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.”

Joanne K. Rowling (1965) British novelist, author of the Harry Potter series

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 London Premiere (July 2011)
2010s

Lee Child photo
Aurelius Augustinus photo
Natsume Soseki photo

“Use your intellect to guide you, and you will end up putting people off. Rely on your emotions, and you will forever be pushed around. Force your will on others, and you will live in constant tension. There is no getting around it—people are hard to live with.”

Natsume Soseki (1867–1916) Japanese novelist

Chi ni hatarakeba kado ga tatsu. Jō ni saosaseba nagasareru. Iji o tōseba kyūkutsu da. Tokaku ni hito no yo wa suminikui.
草枕 Kusamakura, 1906.

Napoleon I of France photo

“Waterloo will wipe out the memory of my forty victories; but that which nothing can wipe out is my Civil Code. That will live forever.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

As quoted in The Story of World Progress (1922) by Willis Mason West, p. 437
Attributed

Hunter S. Thompson photo
Anthony de Mello photo
Friedrich Schiller photo
Volodymyr Melnykov photo
Friedrich Schiller photo
H.P. Lovecraft photo

“I do differ from you radically in respect to familiar things & scenes; for I always demand close correlation with the landscape & historic stream to which I belong, & would feel completely lost in infinity without a system of reference-points based on known & accustomed objects. I take complete relativity so much for granted, that I cannot conceive of anything as existing in itself in any recognisable form. What gives things an aspect & quasi-significance to us is the fact that we view things consistently from a certain artificial & fortuitous angle. Without the preservation of that angle, coherent consciousness & entity itself becomes inconceivable. Thus my wish for freedom is not so much a wish to put all terrestrial things behind me & plunge forever into abysses beyond light, matter, & energy. That, indeed, would mean annihilation as a personality rather than liberation. My wish is perhaps best defined as a wish for infinite visioning & voyaging power, yet without loss of the familiar background which gives all things significance. I want to know what stretches Outside, & be able to visit all the gulfs & dimensions beyond Space & Time. I want, too, to juggle the calendar at will; bringing things from the immemorial past down into the present, & making long journeys into the forgotten years. But I want the familiar Old Providence of my childhood as a perpetual base for these necromancies & excursions—& in a good part of these necromancies & excursions I want certain transmuted features of Old Providence to form part of the alien voids I visit or conjure up. I am as geographic-minded as a cat—places are everything to me. Long observation has shewn me that no other objective experience can give me even a quarter of the kick I can extract from the sight of a fresh landscape or urban vista whose antiquity & historic linkages are such as to correspond with certain fixed childhood dream-patterns of mine. Of course my twilight cosmos of half-familiar, fleetingly remembered marvels is just as unattainable as your Ultimate Abysses—this being the real secret of its fascination. Nothing really known can continue to be acutely fascinating—the charm of many familiar things being mainly resident in their power to symbolise or suggest unknown extensions & overtones.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Clark Ashton Smith (7 November 1930), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 214
Non-Fiction, Letters

Abraham Lincoln photo
Sylvia Plath photo
Daniel Handler photo
Naomi Klein photo
Abraham Lincoln photo
Galileo Galilei photo

“It seems to me proper to adorn the Author's thought here with its conformity to a conception of Plato's regarding the determination of the various speeds of equable motion in the celestial motions of revolution. …he said that God, after having created the movable celestial bodies, in order to assign to them those speeds with which they must be moved perpetually in equable circular motion, made them depart from rest and move through determinate spaces in that natural straight motion in which we sensibly see our moveables to be moved from the state of rest, successively accelerating. And he added that these having been made to gain that degree [of speed] which it pleased God that they should maintain forever, He turned their straight motion into circulation, the only kind [of motion] that is suitable to be conserved equably, turning always without retreat from or approach toward any pre-established goal desired by them. The conception is truly worthy of Plato, and it is to be more esteemed to the extent that its foundations, of which Plato remained silent, but which were discovered by our Author in removing their poetical mask or semblance, show it the guise of a true story.”

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer

I. Bernard Cohen's thesis: Galileo believed only circular (not straight line) motion may be conserved (perpetual), see The New Birth of Physics (1960).
Sagredo, Day Four, Stillman Drake translation (1974) pp.283-284
Dialogues and Mathematical Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences (1638)

Paul Gerhardt photo

“Oh! make me Thine forever;
And should I fainting be,
Lord! let me never, never,
Outlive my love to Thee!”

Paul Gerhardt (1607–1676) German hymn writer

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 400.

Abraham Lincoln photo

“I mean the powerful influence which the interesting scenes of the Revolution had upon the passions of the people as distinguished from their judgment. By this influence, the jealousy, envy, and avarice incident to our nature and so common to a state of peace, prosperity, and conscious strength, were for the time in a great measure smothered and rendered inactive, while the deep-rooted principles of hate, and the powerful motive of revenge, instead of being turned against each other, were directed exclusively against the British nation. And thus, from the force of circumstances, the basest principles of our nature, were either made to lie dormant, or to become the active agents in the advancement of the noblest cause — that of establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty. But this state of feeling must fade, is fading, has faded, with the circumstances that produced it. I do not mean to say that the scenes of the Revolution are now or ever will be entirely forgotten, but that, like everything else, they must fade upon the memory of the world, and grow more and more dim by the lapse of time. In history, we hope, they will be read of, and recounted, so long as the Bible shall be read; but even granting that they will, their influence cannot be what it heretofore has been. Even then they cannot be so universally known nor so vividly felt as they were by the generation just gone to rest. At the close of that struggle, nearly every adult male had been a participator in some of its scenes. The consequence was that of those scenes, in the form of a husband, a father, a son, or a brother, a living history was to be found in every family — a history bearing the indubitable testimonies of its own authenticity, in the limbs mangled, in the scars of wounds received, in the midst of the very scenes related — a history, too, that could be read and understood alike by all, the wise and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned. But those histories are gone. They can be read no more forever. They were a fortress of strength; but what invading foeman could never do, the silent artillery of time has done — the leveling of its walls. They are gone. They were a forest of giant oaks; but the all-restless hurricane has swept over them, and left only here and there a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its foliage, unshading and unshaded, to murmur in a few more gentle breezes, and to combat with its mutilated limbs a few more ruder storms, then to sink and be no more. They were pillars of the temple of liberty; and now that they have crumbled away that temple must fall unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1830s, The Lyceum Address (1838)

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach photo
Paul Valéry photo

“This quiet roof, where dove-sails saunter by,
Between the pines, the tombs, throbs visibly.
Impartial noon patterns the sea in flame —
That sea forever starting and re-starting.
When thought has had its hour, oh how rewarding
Are the long vistas of celestial calm!”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes,
Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes;
Midi le juste y compose de feux
La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée
O récompense après une pensée
Qu'un long regard sur le calme des dieux!
Le Cimetière Marin · Online original and translation as "The Graveyard By The Sea" by C. Day Lewis http://unix.cc.wmich.edu/%7Ecooneys/poems/fr/valery.daylewis.html
Variant translations:
The sea, the ever renewing sea!
Charmes ou poèmes (1922)

Abraham Lincoln photo
Kazuo Ishiguro photo
Carlos Ruiz Zafón photo
John Lennon photo
Lady Gaga photo
Adi Da Samraj photo
Mark Twain photo
Jordan Peterson photo
Abraham Lincoln photo

“In the beginning of the year 1854 a new policy was inaugurated with the avowed object and confident promise that it would entirely and forever put an end to the Slavery agitation. It was again and again declared that under this policy, when once successfully established, the country would be forever rid of this whole question. Yet under the operation of that policy this agitation has not only not ceased, but it has been constantly augmented. And this too, although, from the day of its introduction, its friends, who promised that it would wholly end all agitation, constantly insisted, down to the time that the Lecompton bill was introduced, that it was working admirably, and that its inevitable tendency was to remove the question forever from the politics of the country. Can you call to mind any Democratic speech, made after the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, down to the time of the Lecompton bill, in which it was not predicted that the Slavery agitation was just at an end; that "the abolition excitement was played out," "the Kansas question was dead," "they have made the most they can out of this question and it is now forever settled."”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

But since the Lecompton bill no Democrat, within my experience, has ever pretended that he could see the end. That cry has been dropped. They themselves do not pretend, now, that the agitation of this subject has come to an end yet.
1860s, Allow the humblest man an equal chance (1860)

C.G. Jung photo

“All ordinary expression may be explained causally, but creative expression which is the absolute contrary of ordinary expression, will be forever hidden from human knowledge.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Psychology and Poetry (June 1930)

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry photo

“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.”

Les grandes personnes ne comprennent jamais rien toutes seules, et c'est fatigant, pour les enfants, de toujours leur donner des explications.
Le Petit Prince (1943)

Theodore Roosevelt photo
Joey Comeau photo

“I'd rather die terrified than live forever.”

Joey Comeau (1980) writer

A Softer World

Jesse Owens photo

“I decided I wasn't going to come down. I was going to fly. I was going to stay up in the air forever.”

Jesse Owens (1913–1980) American track and field athlete

On his final record-breaking leap in the long-jump competition.
Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete (1990)

Robert Browning photo

“This could but have happened once,—
And we missed it, lost it forever.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

Youth and Art, xvii.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Robert Browning photo

“How good is man's life, the mere living!
How fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses
Forever in joy!”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

"Saul", ix.
Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845)

Stephen King photo
John Lennon photo
Samael Aun Weor photo
Jung Myung Seok photo

“If you consume all your strength of time in worthless matters. And therefore, due to a lack of time and strength cannot work on what’s eternal, how regrettable that would be! You will regret forever.”

Jung Myung Seok (1945) South Korean Leader of New Religious Movement, Poet, Author, Founder of Wolmyeongdong Center

Extracted from Proverbs Blog https://providencepath.wordpress.com/2016/06/26/jung-myung-seok-dont-regret-in-your-life/ ]

David Attenborough photo
Mike Shinoda photo