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
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
Immortality is but ubiquity in time.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
While death and darkness girdle me
I grope for immortality.
LIONEL JOHNSON
"Magic"
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
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?
We speak of immortality as explaining the mystery of life, but it simply postpones an explanation.
CHARLES CARROLL EVERETT, Immortality and Other Essays
Immortality is the only true success.
JAMES DEAN
attributed, New York Magazine, 1976
A man's immortality can be found in his children.
PATRICIA BRIGGS
Raven's Shadow
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
God's child shares his Father's immortality.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
It's immortality we crave ... that museum of ten thousand things stockpiled beyond our fleeting earthly hours.
ROBERT CORDING
"Reading Donne"
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
Immortality. The condition of a dead man who doesn’t believe that he is dead.
H. L. MENCKEN
A Little Book in C Major
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
Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come.
KAREN JOY FOWLER
Sarah Canary
Immortal life is something to be earned,
By slow self-conquest, comradeship with Pain,
And patient seeking after higher truths.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Immortality"
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
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
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