quotations about immortality
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
The question of human immortality is the most momentous that the mind is capable of conceiving. If it is a fact that the dead live all other facts are in comparison trivial and without interest. The prospect of obtaining certain knowledge with regard to this stupendous matter is not encouraging. In all countries but those in barbarism the powers of the profoundest and most penetrating intelligences have been ceaselessly addressed to the task of glimpsing a life beyond this life; yet today no one can truly say that he knows. It is as much a matter of faith as ever it was.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Immortality", A Cynic Looks at Life
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
Rejoice, ye wise and good! tremble, ye knaves and fools! (who is anxious for your happiness?) for immortality, that pleasing awful thought, is no fantastic dream. Not only is it brought to light in the gospel; it is written in the volumes of creation and providence.
WILLIAM MCEWEN
"On Immortality", Select Essays Doctrinal & Practical on a Variety of the Most Important and Interesting Subjects in Divinity
The question of immortality is of its nature not a scholarly question. It is a question welling up from the interior which the subject must put to itself as it becomes conscious of itself.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
A man's immortality can be found in his children.
PATRICIA BRIGGS
Raven's Shadow
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"
We speak of immortality as explaining the mystery of life, but it simply postpones an explanation.
CHARLES CARROLL EVERETT, Immortality and Other Essays
We stand upon the earth, and see that the same destiny has been appointed to all her children. We see all the generations of plants and animals pass away as the generations of men pass away. We know that the bird which mounts with the gladdest song to heaven will soon be voiceless and motionless; we know that the beast which treads the forest with the lordliest step will soon roam its depths no more; just as we know that the crowds of busy men that throng our city streets will disappear, and the places that now know them will know them no more forever. And so we think that the same shadow has fallen upon all the children of the earth. We find a certain sad consolation in this common fellowship, in the thought that the doom of mortality has fallen upon all alike; but we are wrong. Though all pass through the valley of death, all do not feel the shadow of it. Man stands alone in the consciousness of mortality. To him alone the secret has been whispered.
CHARLES CARROLL EVERETT
Immortality and Other Essays
God's child shares his Father's immortality.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
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?
Immortal life is something to be earned,
By slow self-conquest, comradeship with Pain,
And patient seeking after higher truths.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Immortality"
Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come.
KAREN JOY FOWLER
Sarah Canary
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
Immortality is the only true success.
JAMES DEAN
attributed, New York Magazine, 1976
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
Time is endless and ours. Love and Death are only the games we play in it.
TANITH LEE
Delirium's Mistress
Immortality. The condition of a dead man who doesn’t believe that he is dead.
H. L. MENCKEN
A Little Book in C Major
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