Quotes on Immortality

Literature is the immortality of speech.

Today we bury his remains in the earth as a seed of immortality. Our hearts are full of sadness, yet at the same time of joyful hope and profound gratitude.

The mass of men worry themselves into nameless graves while here and there a great unselfish soul forgets himself into immortality.

We who choose to surround ourselves_x000D_ with lives even more temporary than our_x000D_ own, live within a fragile circle;_x000D_ easily and often breached._x000D_ Unable to accept its awful gaps,_x000D_ we would still live no other way._x000D_ We cherish memory as the only_x000D_ certain immortality, never fully_x000D_ understanding the necessary plan.

The ocean of Spirit has become the little bubble of my soul. Whether floating in birth, or disappearing in death, in the ocean of cosmic awareness the bubble of my life cannot die. I am indestructible consciousness, protected in the bosom of Spirit’s immortality.

Meditation is the royal road to the attainment of freedom, a mysterious ladder that reaches from earth to heaven, darkness to light, mortality to Immortality.

Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity. We depend on the guarantee in our children's faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.

Of all the wonders that the world had to offer, only art promised immortality.

Upon the great questions of origin, of destiny, of immortality, of . . . other worlds, every honest man must say, 'I do not know.' Upon these questions, this is the creed of intelligence.

Attention leads to immortality. Carelessness leads to death. Those who pay attention will not die, while the careless are as good as dead already.

There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.

The brain, knowing that a person can't live forever in this world, rationalizes a future, or other-dimensional, world in which immortality is possible. In other words, religion is the earliest form of science fiction.

That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives. All the attendant hoopla about it, the success over it or the critical rejection—none of that really matters. In the end, the thing will survive or not on its own merits. Not that immortality via art is any big deal. Truffaut died, and we all felt awful about it, and there were the appropriate eulogies, and his wonderful films live on. But it’s not much help to Truffaut.

The world of art is not a world of immortality but of metamorphosis.

Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now.

A good memory and a tongue tied in the middle is a combination which gives immortality to conversation.

There is only one way to get ready for immortality, and that is to love this life and live it as bravely and faithfully and cheerfully as we can.

This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness...they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.

Death is not a blotting-out of existence, a final escape from life; nor is death the door to immortality. He who has fled his Self in earthly joys will not recapture It amidst the gossamer charms of an astral world. There he merely accumulates finer perceptions and more sensitive responses to the beautiful and the good, which are one. It is on the anvil of this gross earth that struggling man must hammer out the imperishable gold of spiritual identity.

I ask no risen dust to teach me immortality; I am conscious of eternal life.

I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this," well, that would be enough immortality for me.