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“It is eternity now.”
Jefferies collapses ordinary chronological distinctions into an intensely experienced present, describing the current moment as participation in eternity rather than a point merely passing toward the future.
Source note: The Story of My Heart, Chapter I; Project Gutenberg #2317. This is Jefferies’s speculative spiritual autobiography and the statement is philosophical-poetic, not a scientific theory of time.
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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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“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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“The love of life is, in general, the effect not of our enjoyments, but of our passions.”
Hazlitt argues that attachment to continued life is driven less by a simple calculation of pleasure than by active desires, interests and passions that keep a person engaged with what may happen next.
Source note: The Round Table, No. 1, “On the Love of Life,” dated January 15, 1815 in the public-domain collected text. The essay analyzes attachment to continued existence rather than offering medical or psychological evidence.
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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.