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“Now is eternity; now is the immortal life.”
The repeated ‘now’ intensifies Jefferies’s claim that spiritual significance is experienced in the present rather than postponed to a distant future or afterlife.
Source note: The Story of My Heart, Chapter I; Project Gutenberg #2317. Jefferies is articulating a personal metaphysical intuition, so the source note preserves its spiritual and literary character.
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“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.”
Death becomes continuity with nature rather than simple disappearance, connecting mortality with renewal, earth, and the lives that follow.
Source note: Final section of “Song of Myself”; the speaker imagines returning physically to the earth.
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“In a world where all is fleeting, change alone endures.”
Stability is temporary, so practical judgment requires expecting change rather than treating present arrangements as permanent.
Source note: Counsels and Maxims, T. Bailey Saunders translation, in a discussion of fortune and apparent stability.
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“The future is yet to come”
The brief phrase anchors Hazlitt’s argument that the future does not possess greater reality merely because it has not happened yet; he compares its status with the already completed past.
Source note: Table-Talk, essay III, “On the Past and Future.” This is a short excerpt from Hazlitt’s comparison of past, present and future, not a standalone prediction about what the future will contain.
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“Forever — is composed of Nows —”
The future and the infinite are made from successive present moments, giving ordinary time a larger philosophical significance.
Source note: Poem 690; Dickinson builds the abstract idea of eternity from individual present moments.
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“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”
Keats opens the poem by claiming that beauty can continue to give delight beyond the instant in which it is first encountered.
Source note: Endymion, Book I, opening line; Project Gutenberg #24280. This is a poetic proposition within a Romantic work, not an empirical rule that every aesthetic experience remains pleasurable forever.