IMMORTALITY QUOTES V

quotations about immortality

God's child shares his Father's immortality.

LYMAN ABBOTT

The Home Builder

Tags: Lyman Abbott


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


Immortality is but ubiquity in time.

HERMAN MELVILLE

Moby Dick


A man's immortality can be found in his children.

PATRICIA BRIGGS

Raven's Shadow


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


It's immortality we crave ... that museum of ten thousand things stockpiled beyond our fleeting earthly hours.

ROBERT CORDING

"Reading Donne"


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

Tags: Miguel de Unamuno


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


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


Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come.

KAREN JOY FOWLER

Sarah Canary


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


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

Tags: William James


Immortality is the only true success.

JAMES DEAN

attributed, New York Magazine, 1976


We speak of immortality as explaining the mystery of life, but it simply postpones an explanation.

CHARLES CARROLL EVERETT, Immortality and Other Essays


Immortality. The condition of a dead man who doesn’t believe that he is dead.

H. L. MENCKEN

A Little Book in C Major


Immortal life is something to be earned,
By slow self-conquest, comradeship with Pain,
And patient seeking after higher truths.

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

"Immortality"


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


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


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