Immortality Quotes - Page 10

• Immortality—dazzling idea! who first imagined thee! Was it some jolly burgher of Nuremburg, who with night-cap on his head, and white clay pipe in mouth, sat on some pleasant summer evening before his door, and reflected in all his comfort, that it would be right pleasant, if, with unextinguishable pipe, and endless breath, he could thus vegetate onwards for a blessed eternity? Or was it a lover, who in the arms of his loved one, thought the immortality-thought, and that because he could think and feel naught beside!—Love! Immortality!

  Heinrich Heine

  Death, Summer, Blessed

  Heinrich Heine (1891). “The Works of Heinrich Heine”

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• Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts.

  Anthony Burgess

  Memories, Soul, Sainthood

  Anthony Burgess (1990). “You've had your time: being the second part of the confessions of Anthony Burgess”, Heinemann Educational Books

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• It was that quality that led me into aviation in the first place — it was a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of man — where immortality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same instant.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Appreciation, Adventure, Men

  Charles A. Lindbergh, Reeve Lindbergh (2003). “The Spirit of St. Louis”, p.255, Simon and Schuster

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• If you question any candid person who is no longer young, he is very likely to tell you that, having tasted life in this world, he has no wish to begin again as a "new boy" in another.

  Bertrand Russell

  Boys, Wish, World

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Bertrand Russell's Best”, p.32, Routledge

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• If you want to ascend like the Prophet to the sky of immortality, know this very well: Fasting is your Arabian stallion.

  Rumi

  Sky, Want, Fasting

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• It is wise to seek immortality for time defeats all other ambitions.

  Vernon Howard

  Wise, Ambition, Defeat

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• Nothing can be plainer, than that the motions, changes, decays, and dissolutions, which we hourly see befall natural bodies (and which is what we mean by the course of nature), cannot possibly affect an active, simple, uncompounded substance: such a being therefore is indissoluble by the force of nature, that is to say, the soul of man is naturally immortal.

  George Berkeley

  Nature, Mean, Simple

  George Berkeley (2015). “A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge”, p.82, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• Our actions must clothe us with an immortality loathsome or glorious.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Our Actions, Action, Glorious

  Charles Caleb Colton (1824). “Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think”, p.37

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• By conversing with the mighty dead, we imbibe sentiment with knowledge. We become strongly attached to those who can no longer either hurt or serve us, except through the influence which they exert over the mind. We feel the presence of that power which gives immortality to human thoughts and actions, and catch the flame of enthusiasm from all nations and ages.

  William Hazlitt

  Hurt, Reading, Flames

  William Hazlitt, Herschel Moreland Sikes, William Hallam Bonner, Gerald Lahey (1979). “The Letters of William Hazlitt”, p.224, Springer

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• Men of dissolute lives have little incentive to look forward to the hopes and glories of immortality. A due conception of these would be incompatible with such a life.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Men, Would Be, Looks

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• Death! It is rest to the aged, it is oblivion to the atheist, it is immortality to the poet!

  Ouida

  Death, Atheist, Oblivion

  Ouida (2016). “Wisdom, Wit and Pathos of Ouida”, p.92, Ouida

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• All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise. Lord Burleigh is not the only statesman who has thought one hundred pounds too much for a song, though sung by Spenser; although Oliver Goldsmith is the only poet who ever considered himself to have been overpaid.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Song, Writing, Pay

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.24

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• How can it enter into the thoughts of man, that the soul, which is capable of such immense perfections, and of receiving new improvements to all eternity, shall fall away into nothing almost as soon as it is created?

  Joseph Addison

  Fall, Men, Perfection

  Joseph Addison (1842). “The Works of Joseph Addison”, p.171

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• If God bestowed immortality on every man then when he made him, and he made many to whom he never purposed to give his saving grace, what did his Lordship think that God gave any man immortality with purpose only to make him capable of immortal torments? It is a hard saying, and I think cannot piously be believed. I am sure it can never be proved by the canonical Scripture.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Men, Thinking, Giving

  Thomas Hobbes (1750). “The Moral and Political Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury: Never Before Collected Together : To which is Prefixed, the Author's Life, Extracted from that Said to be Written by Himself, ...”, p.448

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• Earth may embitter, not remove,
  The love divinely given;
  And e'en that mortal grief shall prove
  The immortality of love,
  And lead us nearer heaven.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Grief, Heaven, Sorrow

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1838). “The seraphim, and other poems, by E.B. Barrett”, p.360

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• An earthly immortality belongs to a great and good character. History embalms it; it lives in its moral influence, in its authority, in its example, in the memory of the words and deeds in which it was manifested; and as every age adds to the illustrations of its efficacy, it may chance to be the best understood by a remote posterity.

  Edward Everett

  Memories, Character, Illustration

  Edward Everett (1850). “Orations and speeches on various occasions”, p.576

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• When I consider the wonderful activity of the mind, so great a memory of what is past, and such a capacity of penetrating into the future: when I behold such a number of arts and sciences, and such a multitude of discoveries hence arising,--I believe and am firmly persuaded that a nature which contains so many things within itself cannot be mortal.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Art, Memories, Believe

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• A composition which dazzles at first sight by gaudy epithets, or brilliant turns or expression, or glittering trains of imagery, may fade gradually from the mind, leaving no enduring impression; but words which flow fresh and warm from a full heart, and which are instinct with the life and breath of human feeling, pass into household memories, and partake of the immortality of the affections from which they spring.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Memories, Spring, Heart

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Essays and Reviews”, p.40

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• Not all the subtilties of metaphysics can make me doubt a moment of the immortality of the soul, and of a beneficent Providence. I feel it, I believe it, I desire it, I hope it, and will defend it to my last breath.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Believe, Soul, Doubt

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• The skeptic has no illusions about life, nor a vain belief in the promise of immortality. Since this life here and now is all we can know, our most reasonable option is to live it fully.

  Paul Kurtz

  Promise, Atheism, Belief

  Paul Kurtz (1986). “The Transcendental Temptation: A Critique of Religion and the Paranormal”

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• It is easy to remove the mind from harping on the lost illusion of immortality. The disciplined intellect fears nothing and craves no sugar-plum at the day's end, but is content to accept life and serve society as best it may. Personally I would not care for immortality in the least. There is nothing better than oblivion, since in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. We had it before we were born, yet did not complain. Shall we whine because we know it will return? It is Elysium enough for me, at any rate.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Mind, Wish, Atheism

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com. 1921.

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• The arguments for immortality, weak when you take them one by one, are no more cogent when you take them together... For my part, I cannot see how consciousness can persist when its physical basis has been destroyed, and I am too sure of the interconnection of my body and my mind to think that any survival of my my consciousness apart from my body would be in any sense a survival of myself.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Thinking, Survival, Mind

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• It does not seem to me that the evidence concerning the being of a God, and concerning immortality, is such as to enable us to assert anything in regard to either of these topics.

  Charles Eliot Norton

  Atheism, Doe, Topics

  John Ruskin, Charles Eliot Norton, John Lewis Bradley, Ian Ousby (1987). “The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton”, p.175, Cambridge University Press

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• Scholasticism, a concept which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept specifically designed to sustain faith in the immortality of the soul.

  Miguel de Unamuno

  Soul, Criticism, Atheism

  Miguel de Unamuno (1977). “The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations”, p.90, Princeton University Press

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• I feel my immortality over sweep all pains, all tears, all time, all fears, - and peal, like the eternal thunders of the deep, into my ears, this truth, - thou livest forever!

  Lord Byron

  Pain, Forever, Tears

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