quotations about immortality
My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
EMILY DICKINSON
Poems
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
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
He ne'er is crown'd
With immortality, who fears to follow
Where airy voices lead.
JOHN KEATS
Endymion
Everything mortal has moments immortal,
Swift and God-gifted, immeasurably bright.
AMY LOWELL
"A Winter Ride", A Dome of Many-coloured Glass
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
'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
The only way to find out if you're immortal is to make it to the end of time and look around to see if you're still alive. Until you've done that, all you know is that you haven't died yet.
JOHN PATRICK LOWRIE
Dancing with Eternity
Most children feel immortal--they have no sense that they're ever going to die. For a child, even growing up is something that's barely comprehensible.
JOHN SAUL
Shadows
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
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
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
There's one form of immortality I like to think about. It's that all those who from the very first have given anything to the world are living in the world to-day.
SUSAN GLASPELL
Little Masks
Immortality is but ubiquity in time.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
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
Oh how wrong we were to think immortality meant never dying.
GERARD WAY
attributed, Les Clowns Vengeurs
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
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
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
While death and darkness girdle me
I grope for immortality.
LIONEL JOHNSON
"Magic"