quotations about immortality
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
He ne'er is crown'd
With immortality, who fears to follow
Where airy voices lead.
JOHN KEATS
Endymion
Oh how wrong we were to think immortality meant never dying.
GERARD WAY
attributed, Les Clowns Vengeurs
'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
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
Everything mortal has moments immortal,
Swift and God-gifted, immeasurably bright.
AMY LOWELL
"A Winter Ride", A Dome of Many-coloured Glass
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
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
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
While death and darkness girdle me
I grope for immortality.
LIONEL JOHNSON
"Magic"
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
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
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?