quotations about immortality
Most children feel immortal--they have no sense that they're ever going to die. For a child, even growing up is something that's barely comprehensible.
JOHN SAUL
Shadows
A man's immortality can be found in his children.
PATRICIA BRIGGS
Raven's Shadow
Immortality. The condition of a dead man who doesn’t believe that he is dead.
H. L. MENCKEN
A Little Book in C Major
All who live possess eternal life, and few would trade it for an immortal body, if they truly understood what it is to be alive.
AUDREY AUDEN
Realms Unreel
Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn't a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.
STEPHEN KING
Hearts in Atlantis
It's immortality we crave ... that museum of ten thousand things stockpiled beyond our fleeting earthly hours.
ROBERT CORDING
"Reading Donne"
Only the feeble resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire for the longing for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance of life overflows upon the other side of death.
MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO
The Tragic Sense of Life
Never say you are too old. You do not say it now, perhaps; but by and by, when the hair grows gray and the eyes grow dim and the young despair comes to curse the old age, you will say, "It is too late for me." Never too late! Never too old! How old are you--thirty, fifty, eighty? What is that in immortality? We are but children.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
I am certain that those who seek by perpetuities to create for themselves a kind of immortality on earth will fail, if only because no institution and no foundation can last forever. If some men are remembered years and centuries after the death of their last contemporaries it is not because of endowments they created. Harvard, Yale, Bodley, and Smithson, to be sure are still on men's lips. But those names are now not those of men but of institutions. If any of these men strove for everlasting remembrance, they must feel kinship with Nesselrode, who lived a diplomat, but is immortal as a pudding.
JULIUS ROSENWALD
The Atlantic Monthly, May 1929
The ignorant man, the savage, felt intuitively that he was immortal. The learned man, the philosopher, reasons that he is immortal because only thus does life make sense. The Christian theologian believes in immortality because Jesus of Nazareth taught it and proved it, and because without it the goodness and justice of God can be called into question. Injustice, he points out, is so obvious in this world that if there is not another world in which redress is possible, God cannot be either just or moral; either that or God is not good, in which case the true divine arbiter is Satan. So men at all levels of cultural development from savagery to modern times have believed in life after death. They have felt that it was so, they have reasoned that it ought to be so, they have had faith that it was so. But does that make it so?
ALSON J. SMITH
Immortality: The Scientific Evidence
If I have any beliefs at all about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
JAMES THURBER
People Have More Fun Than Anybody
Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come.
KAREN JOY FOWLER
Sarah Canary
Immortality is here and now, and is not a speculative something beyond the grave. It is a lucid state of consciousness in which the sensations of the body, the varying and unrestful states of mind, and the circumstances and events of life are seen to be of a fleeting and therefore of an illusory character.
JAMES ALLEN
Above Life's Turmoil
If you want immortality, then deny form. Whatever has form has mortality. Beyond form is the formless, the immortal.
FRANK HERBERT
God Emperor of Dune
Immortality is one of the great spiritual needs of man. The churches have constituted themselves the official guardians of the need, with the result that some of them actually pretend to accord or to withhold it from the individual by their conventional sacraments.
WILLIAM JAMES
The Will to Believe and Human Immortality
We speak of immortality as explaining the mystery of life, but it simply postpones an explanation.
CHARLES CARROLL EVERETT, Immortality and Other Essays
A heavenly idea comes up a lot in what might be called Silicon Valley metaphysics. We anticipate immortality through mechanization. A common claim in utopian technology culture is that people--well, perhaps not everyone--will be uploaded into cloud computing servers later in this century, perhaps in a decade or two, to become immortal in Virtual Reality. Or, if we are to remain physical, we will be surrounded by a world animated with robotic technology. We will float from joy to joy, even the poorest among us living like a sybaritic magician. We will not have to call forth what we wish from the world, for we will be so well modeled by statistics in the computing clouds that the dust will know what we want.
JARON LANIER
Who Owns the Future?
A voice within us speaks the startling words, "Man, thou shalt never die!" Celestial voices hymn around our souls the song of our great immortality.
R. H. DANA
attributed, Day's Collacon
If there be one truth that we need more than another, to steady us and keep us cheerful in the midst of accidents, dangers, fears, and deaths, it is this truth of immortality. God cannot work out His plan for us on this narrow platform, and in these few years. The stage is much too small for the drama of life.... So much begins here--the lives of babes, of little children--with such promise in them, and no room for performance. And what are we all but children of a larger growth--infants crying for a light, and with no language but a cry? The one imperious necessity seems to be immortality.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
Immortal life is something to be earned,
By slow self-conquest, comradeship with Pain,
And patient seeking after higher truths.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Immortality"