Immortality Quotes - Page 31

• What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour?

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Time, Carpe Diem, Half

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• One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.

  Albert Camus

  Play, Next Day, Week

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Fall”, p.105, Vintage

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• I had wanted to live forever as a gypsy girl; I had wanted to live forever as a child, tumbling down a rabbit hole. I had been granted both wishes, only to find immortality was not what it had promised to be; instead of a passport to the future, it was a yoke that bound me to the past.

  Melanie Benjamin

  Girl, Children, Past

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• From my spirit's gray defeat, From my pulse's flagging beat, From my hopes that turned to sand Sifting through my close-clenched hand, From my own fault's slavery, If I can sing, I still am free. For with my singing I can make A refuge for my spirit's sake, A house of shining words, to be My fragile immortality.

  Sara Teasdale

  Hands, House, Shining

  Sara Teasdale (1917). “Love Songs”

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• Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words - the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered.

  J. Michael Straczynski

  Writing, Long, Proxy

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• Before thou callest a man hero or genius, investigate whether his exertion has features of indelibility; for all that is celestial, all genius, is the offspring of immortality.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Hero, Men, Genius

  "Aphorisms on man. Translated from the original manuscript of the Rev. John Caspar Lavater, citizen of Zuric. ; [One line from Juvenal]" by Johann Kaspar Lavater, 1790.

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• Faithfulness, faith, all of the words that so few people live, you must live. Only then are you worthy of immortality.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhist, Buddhism, People

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• Nirvikalpa samadhi is a state of no mind, beyond the ten thousand states of mind, where there is nothing but perfection, where the self no longer exists...the ego dissolves into immortality.

  Frederick Lenz

  Self, Perfection, Ego

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• I have good hope that there is something remaining for the dead.

  Socrates

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• How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten.

  Washington Irving

  Character, Past, Thinking

  Washington Irving (2012). “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories”, p.70, Courier Corporation

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• I need to take a break from this life as a human for 45 minutes and go experience a little bit of immortality.

  D. M. Turner

  Littles, Needs, Break

  Interview with Elizabeth Gips, www.tripzine.com. May 1, 2001.

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• The most beautiful conception of immortality of which I know, and certainly one that by contrast shows the utter vulgarity of Christian ideas, is set forth in Pindar's second Olympian: after three or six lives in which a man has lived with strict justice and perfect integrity, he passes beyond the tower of Cronus to the fair realm that cannot be reached by land or sea, where gentle breezes from a placid ocean blow forever on the fields of asphodel. For a description, see Pindar. If the beauty of great poetry can commend a religion, here you have it.

  Revilo P. Oliver

  Beautiful, Christian, Integrity

  "Afterthoughts on Afterlife". "Instauration" Magazine, August 1980.

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• The great difference between the real leader and the pretender is that the one sees into the future, while the other regards only the present; the one lives by the day, and acts upon expediency; the other acts on enduring principles and for the immortality.

  Edmund Burke

  Leadership, Real, Differences

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• In Wilson's scale of evaluations breakfast rated just after life itself and ahead of the chance of immortality.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Breakfast, Evaluation, Chance

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• You'll live forever in our hearts, big man. That particularly galled me, because it implied the immortality of those left behind: You will live forever in my memory, because I will live forever! I AM YOUR GOD NOW, DEAD BOY! I OWN YOU!

  John Green

  Memories, Real, Heart

  John Green (2012). “The Fault in Our Stars”, p.171, Penguin UK

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• Here's the thing. I hate kids. Always have. I mean, I know the job of the race, biologically speaking, is to achieve immortality through reproduction, but the idea of getting impregnated and blowing up like a balloon as I serve as a carrier and service unit for this other person who will eventually burst out of me in the most terrifying way imaginable, then carry on using me one way or another for the rest of my life, is right up there with throwing myself off the top of a twenty-story building. If I have a biological clock, it is digital and does not tick.

  Isobelle Carmody

  Jobs, Hate, Mean

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• Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves And Immortality. We slowly drove, he knew no haste, And I had put away My labour, and my leisure too, For his civility. We passed the school where children played, Their lessons scarcely done; We passed the fields of gazing grain, We passed the setting sun. We paused before a house that seemed A swelling of the ground; The roof was scarcely visible, The cornice but a mound. Since then 'tis centuries; but each Feels shorter than the day I first surmised the horses' heads Were toward eternity.

  Emily Dickinson

  Horse, Children, School

  'Because I could not stop for Death' (c.1863)

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• My hair would continue to gray, and then one day, it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close to the present one, meaninglessly like the present one, I would disappear from the earth. And all these emotions, all these yearnings, all these data, if that helps to clinch the enormity of what I'm talking about, would be gone. And that's what immortality means. It means selfishness. My generations belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think.

  Gary Shteyngart

  Fall, Mean, Thinking

  Gary Shteyngart (2010). “Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel”, p.88, Random House

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• The hand of bone and sinew and flesh achieves its immortality in taking up a pen. The hand on a page wields a greater power than the fleshly hand ever could in life.

  Laurie R. King

  Hands, Flesh, Pages

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• We are chained to this life by a chain of gold, and we dare not sever it for fear of what lies beyond the drop.

  Cassandra Clare

  Lying, Gold, This Life

  Cassandra Clare (2011). “Clockwork Prince”, p.493, Simon and Schuster

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• It is not about striving for immortality, but about accepting mortality.

  J. K. Rowling

  Strive, Mortality, Accepting

  "Rowling Chats about Deathly Hallows". Interview with Lev Grossman, techland.time.com. July 31, 2007.

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• The reappearance of the crescent moon after the new moon; the return of the Sun after a total eclipse, the rising of the Sun in the morning after its troublesome absence at night were noted by people around the world; these phenomena spoke to our ancestors of the possibility of surviving death. Up there in the skies was also a metaphor of immortality.

  Carl Sagan

  Morning, Sunset, Moon

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• So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough. Nor youth to old age long enough. Immortality and permanence be damned. Sure I want them, but they are nonexistent, and won't matter when I rot underground. All I want to say is: I made the best of a mediocre job. It was a good fight while it lasted. And so life goes.

  Sylvia Plath

  Jobs, Reading, Fighting

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.149, Anchor

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• The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe.

  Jack London

  Zero, Men, Imagination

  Jack London (2008). “To Build a Fire”, p.6, The Creative Company

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• Immortality gets very, very boring. You'd be surprised at how interesting the small mundanities of life can seem after a few millennia.

  N.K. Jemisin

  Interesting, Boring, Seems

  N. K. Jemisin (2010). “The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms”, p.71, Hachette UK

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