quotations about immortality
Even peace of conscience, without the glory of immortality, were but a shadowy happiness.--Were this hope a mere delusion, how could we justify thy procedure, O thou wise and holy governor of the world?
WILLIAM MCEWEN
"On Immortality", Select Essays Doctrinal & Practical on a Variety of the Most Important and Interesting Subjects in Divinity
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
We speak of immortality as explaining the mystery of life, but it simply postpones an explanation.
CHARLES CARROLL EVERETT, Immortality and Other Essays
The belief in immortality is not excluded from a legitimate place in human thought, because it does not admit of an absolute demonstration. It is a future event, and as such, cannot be proved. Human immortality is incapable of demonstration--that absolute logical justification upon such a subject is impossible and inconceivable. The problem is the permanence of the human personality--the continuance of the soul after the death of the body, in the possession of memory, reason, and a self-conscious life. This means the ultimate reasonableness or unreasonableness, of the intelligence or brutality, of the Power that is responsible for our existence. Immortality is one of the greatest spiritual needs of man.
M. D. CHATTERTON
Immortality of Man
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
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?
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
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
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
Immortality is the only true success.
JAMES DEAN
attributed, New York Magazine, 1976
God's child shares his Father's immortality.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
A man's immortality can be found in his children.
PATRICIA BRIGGS
Raven's Shadow
It's immortality we crave ... that museum of ten thousand things stockpiled beyond our fleeting earthly hours.
ROBERT CORDING
"Reading Donne"
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
Immortality. The condition of a dead man who doesn’t believe that he is dead.
H. L. MENCKEN
A Little Book in C Major
Immortal life is something to be earned,
By slow self-conquest, comradeship with Pain,
And patient seeking after higher truths.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Immortality"
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
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
Time is endless and ours. Love and Death are only the games we play in it.
TANITH LEE
Delirium's Mistress