quotations about immortality
Our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
"The Old Manse," Mosses from an Old Manse
'Tis immortality, 'tis that alone,
Amid life's pains, abasements, emptiness,
The soul can comfort, elevate, and fill.
That only, and that amply this performs.
EDWARD YOUNG
Night Thoughts
We are immortal, if we form a link in the great chain of life. It is this unbroken continuity of life, ever rising to nobler levels from the ashes of apparent death that is so beautifully typified by the Phoenix.
M. D. CHATTERTON
Immortality of Man
He ne'er is crown'd
With immortality, who fears to follow
Where airy voices lead.
JOHN KEATS
Endymion
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
Oh how wrong we were to think immortality meant never dying.
GERARD WAY
attributed, Les Clowns Vengeurs
We must be laid like a brand in the fire ... if we would gain immortal youth.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
If the soul be immortal, it requires to be cultivated with attention, not only for what we call the time of life, but for that which is to follow--I mean eternity; and the least neglect in this point may be attended with endless consequences.
SOCRATES
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
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
Immortality is but ubiquity in time.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
Immortality is the only true success.
JAMES DEAN
attributed, New York Magazine, 1976
But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills,
And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me,
And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
Immortal age beside immortal youth,
And all I was, in ashes.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Tithonus
Everything mortal has moments immortal,
Swift and God-gifted, immeasurably bright.
AMY LOWELL
"A Winter Ride", A Dome of Many-coloured Glass
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 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
The woe of mortality makes humans God-like. It is because we know that we must die that we are so busy making life. It is because we are aware of mortality that we preserve the past and create the future. Mortality is ours without asking--but immortality is something we must build ourselves. Immortality is not a mere absence of death; it is defiance and denial of death. It is 'meaningful' only because there is death, that implacable reality which is to be defied.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies
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
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