quotations about immortality
Before Christ brought life and immortality to light, death was the slayer of man's hopes. It left love alive, but love without hope is poignant sorrow.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Other Room
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
We conceive of immortality as having a beginning, but no end; but we conceive of eternity as having neither beginning nor end. Hence it is proper to speak of eternity as the attribute of God, but of immortality as the attribute of man.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
People always live for ever when there is an annuity to be paid them.
JANE AUSTEN
Sense and Sensibility
The wine of immortality I carry with me, and so am never thirsty.
ELSA BARKER
Songs of a Vagrom Angel
And of course, if we agree upon this -- that every immortal thing is incorruptible; it will then follow, not only that the soul is immortal, but that it is incorruptible; and if we cannot agree upon that, we must look out for another proof.
PLATO
Phaedon: or, a Dialogue of the Immortality of the Soul
One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Fall
Time is endless and ours. Love and Death are only the games we play in it.
TANITH LEE
Delirium's Mistress
Now stand at night beneath a clear heaven solemn and severe with stars, comprehend (as the great achievement of our race permits us now to do) what an emptiness and what a scale are there, and you will easily discover in that one glance, or you will feel at least the appalling thing which tempts men to deny their immortality.
HILAIRE BELLOC
"On Immortality", On Something
The quest for immortality has now moved from folklore and legend to a frenetic scientific search for the biochemical keys that will unlock the secrets of aging. We have explained why there are scientific reasons to expect that substances with genuine antiaging properties may exist or are in the process of development, and how these substances might work to slow the aging process. Some of these chemical compounds will probably be available during the lifetimes of most young people alive today. However, it is important to distinguish between these genuine versions of the elixir vitae and the products being sold today under grossly exaggerated claims. It is tempting to believe that the keys to a long and healthy life are available now, but a realistic examination of the science of aging reveals that this is simply not the case. The legitimate science of aging has already led to remarkable extensions of life for many people. We can expect the hard work of researchers and medical practitioners to add to that success in the future.
S. JAY OLSHANSKY & BRUCE A. CARNES
The Quest for Immortality
It is a secret of rich living to live continuously, and not in leaps, as it were, but in steady on-going. For, if there be gaps in life, that is to say, if we lose one part thereof when we have entered another, then one part will be sure to despise another, and if life be despised in any measure, there is small opening for the faith of immortality.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
"Of Immortal Life", Essays
If dead, we cease to be; if total gloom
Swallow up life's brief flash for aye, we fare
As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom,
Whose sound and motion not alone declare,
But are their whole of being! If the breath
Be life itself, and not its task and tent,
If even a soul like Milton's can know death;
O Man! thou vessel purposeless, unmeant,
Yet drone-hive strange of phantom purposes!
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
"On the Denial of Immortality"