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
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
It's immortality we crave ... that museum of ten thousand things stockpiled beyond our fleeting earthly hours.
ROBERT CORDING
"Reading Donne"
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
God's child shares his Father's immortality.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
Immortality is but ubiquity in time.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
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
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
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
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
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
Immortality is one of the great spiritual needs of man. The churches have constituted themselves the official guardians of the need, with the result that some of them actually pretend to accord or to withhold it from the individual by their conventional sacraments.
WILLIAM JAMES
The Will to Believe and Human Immortality
Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come.
KAREN JOY FOWLER
Sarah Canary
We speak of immortality as explaining the mystery of life, but it simply postpones an explanation.
CHARLES CARROLL EVERETT, Immortality and Other Essays
Immortal life is something to be earned,
By slow self-conquest, comradeship with Pain,
And patient seeking after higher truths.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Immortality"
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
Immortality is the only true success.
JAMES DEAN
attributed, New York Magazine, 1976
Immortality. The condition of a dead man who doesn’t believe that he is dead.
H. L. MENCKEN
A Little Book in C Major
The ignorant man, the savage, felt intuitively that he was immortal. The learned man, the philosopher, reasons that he is immortal because only thus does life make sense. The Christian theologian believes in immortality because Jesus of Nazareth taught it and proved it, and because without it the goodness and justice of God can be called into question. Injustice, he points out, is so obvious in this world that if there is not another world in which redress is possible, God cannot be either just or moral; either that or God is not good, in which case the true divine arbiter is Satan. So men at all levels of cultural development from savagery to modern times have believed in life after death. They have felt that it was so, they have reasoned that it ought to be so, they have had faith that it was so. But does that make it so?
ALSON J. SMITH
Immortality: The Scientific Evidence
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