It is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to Plato, and the preaching of the immortality of the soul.
The noble ones who have lived among us have not left us; they only truly came to us when they departed, and they were then first kissed by us into immortality.
The clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality.
Unsterblich sein, das ist der Dichtkunst Los=--Immortality is the destiny of the poetic art.
Angels are those beings who have been on an earth like this, and have passed through the same ordeals that we are now passing through. They have kept their first estate far enough to preserve themselves in the Priesthood. They did not so violate the law of the Priesthood and condemn themselves to the sin against the Holy Ghost as to be finally lost. They are not crowned with the celestial ones. They are persons who have lived upon an earth, but did not magnify the Priesthood in that high degree that many others have done who have become Gods, even the sons of God. Human beings that pertain to this world, who do not magnify or are not capable of magnifying their high calling in the Priesthood and receive crowns of glory, immortality, and eternal lives, will also, when they again receive their bodies, become angels and will receive a glory. They are single, without families or kingdoms to reign over. All the difference between men and angels is, men are passing through the day of trial that angels have already passed through.
To find a new Environment again and cultivate relation with it is to find a new Life. To live is to correspond, and to correspond is to live. So much is true in Science. But it is also true in Religion. And it is of great importance to observe that to Religion also the conception of Life is a correspondence. No truth of Christianity has been more ignorantly or wilfully travestied than the doctrine of Immortality. The popular idea, in spite of a hundred protests, is that Eternal Life is to live forever. . . . We are told that Life Eternal is not to live. This is Life Eternal--TO KNOW. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 216.
I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing in it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it.
When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not the decline that it recalls, but the first days of immortality.
It is remarkable that Hume does not refer to the sentimental arguments for the immortality of the soul which are so much in vogue at the present day; and which are based upon our desire for a longer conscious existence than that which nature appears to have allotted to us. Perhaps he did not think them worth notice. For indeed it is not a little strange, that our strong desire that a certain occurrence should happen should be put forward as evidence that it will happen. If my intense desire to see the friend, from whom I have parted, does not bring him from the other side of the world, or take me thither; if the mother's agonised prayer that her child should live has not prevented him from dying; experience certainly affords no presumption that the strong desire to be alive after death, which we call the aspiration after immortality, is any more likely to be gratified. As Hume truly says, "All doctrines are to be suspected which are favoured by our passions"; and the doctrine, that we are immortal because we should extremely like to be so, contains the quintessence of suspiciousness.
If immortality is meant for no more than a continuance of existence, if by a belief in immortality on the part of the Jews is meant no more than that the Jews did not believe in the annihilation of the soul at the time of death, we may confidently assert that, to the bulk of the Jewish nation, this very idea of annihilation was as yet unfamiliar. The fact is that the idea of absolute annihilation and nothingness is hardly ever found except among people whose mind has received some amount of philosophical education, certainly more than what the Jews possessed in early times. The Jews did not believe in the utter destruction of the soul, but, on the other hand, their idea of life after death was hardly that of life at all. It was existence without life. Death was considered by them, as by the Greeks, as the greatest of misfortunes. To rejoice in death is a purely Christian, not a Jewish, idea. Though the Jews believed that the souls continued to exist in Sheol, they did not believe that the wicked would there be punished and the good rewarded. All rewards and punishments for virtue or vice were confined to this world, and a long life was regarded as a sure proof of the favour of Jehovah. It was the Jewish conception of God, as infinitely removed from this world, that made a belief in true immortality almost impossible for them, and excluded all hope for a nearer approach to God, or for any share in that true immortality which belonged to Him and to Him alone.
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.
The position which Christianity from the very beginning took up with regard to Judaism served as the first lesson in comparative theology, and directed the attention even of the unlearned to a comparison of two religions, differing in their conception of the Deity, in their estimate of humanity, in their motives of morality, and in their hope of immortality, yet sharing so much in common that there are but few of the psalms and prayers in the Old Testament in which a Christian cannot heartily join even now, and but few rules of morality which he ought not even now to obey.
We do not believe immortality because we have proved it, but we for ever try to prove it because we believe it.
Physical religion, beginning in a belief in agents behind the great phenomena of nature, reached its highest point when it had led the human mind to a belief in one Supreme Agent or God, whatever his name might be. It was supposed that this God could be implored by prayers and pleased by sacrifices. He was called the father of gods and men. Yet even in his highest conception, he was no more than what Cardinal Newman defined God to be. 'I mean by the Supreme Being,' he wrote, 'one who is simply self-dependent, and the only being who is such. I mean that he created all things out of nothing, and could destroy them as easily as he made them, and that, in consequence, he is separated from them by an abyss, and incommunicable in all his attributes.' This abyss separating God from man remains at the end of Physical Religion. It constitutes its inherent weakness. But this very weakness becomes in time a source of strength, for from it sprang a yearning for better things. Even the God of the Jews, in His unapproachable majesty, though He might be revered and loved by man during His life on earth, could receive, as it were, a temporary allegiance only, for 'the dead cannot praise God, neither any that go down into darkness!' God was immortal, a man was mortal; and Physical Religion could not throw a bridge over the abyss that separated the two. Real religion, however, requires more than a belief in God, it requires a belief in man also, and an intimate relation between God and man, at all events in a life to come. There is in man an irrepressible desire for continued existence. It shows itself in life in what we may call self-defence. It shows itself at the end of life and at the approach of death, in the hope of immortality.
Our Lord's ascension will have to be understood as a sublime idea, materialised in the language of children. Is not a real fact that happened, in a world in which nothing can happen against the will of God, better than any miracle? Why should we try to know more than we can know, if only we firmly believe that Christ's immortal spirit ascended to the Father? That alone is true immortality, divine immortality; not the resuscitation of the frail mortal body, but the immortality of the immortal divine soul. It was this rising of the Spirit, and not of the body, without which, as St. Paul said, our faith would be vain. It is the Spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing.
Death gives us sleep, eternal youth, and immortality.
Those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings, Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realized, High instincts before which our mortal nature Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.
Much like a subtle spider which doth sit In middle of her web, which spreadeth wide; If aught do touch the utmost thread of it, She feels it instantly on every side.
The tree of knowledge is grafted upon the tree of life; and that fruit which brought the fear of death into the world, budding on an immortal stock, becomes the fruit of the promise of immortality.
The falsity of those philosophers who do not discuss the immortality of the soul. The falsity of their dilemma in Montaigne.
The _Veda_ alone of all works I know treats of a genesis of God-consciousness, compared to which the Theogony of Hesiod is like a worn-out creature. We see it grow slowly and gradually with all its contradictions, its sudden terrors, its amazements, and its triumphs. As God reveals His Being in nature in her order, her indestructibility, in the eternal victory of light over darkness, of spring over winter, in the eternally returning course of the sun and the stars, so man has gradually spelt out of nature the Being of God, and after trying a thousand names for God in vain, we find Him in the _Veda_ already saying: 'They call him Indra, Mitra, Varuna; then they call him the Heavenly, the bird with beautiful wings; that which is One they call in various ways.'... The belief in Immortality is only the other side, as it were, of the God-consciousness, and both are originally natural to the Aryan race.
Each generation gathers together the imperishable children of the past, and increases them by new sons of light, alike radiant with immortality.--_Bancroft._
In lecturing on the origin and growth of religion, my chief object has been to show that a belief in God, in the immortality of the soul, and in a future retribution, can be gained, and not only can be, but has been gained, by the right exercise of human reason alone, without the assistance of what has been called a special revelation. In doing this, I thought I was simply following in the footsteps of the greatest theologians of our time, and that I was serving the cause of true religion by showing, by ample historical evidence, gathered from the Sacred Books of the East, how, what St. Paul, what the Fathers of the Church, what mediæval theologians, and what some of the most learned of modern divines had asserted again and again, was most strikingly confirmed by the records of all non-Christian religions which have lately become accessible to us. I could not have believed it possible that, in undertaking this work, I should have exposed myself to attacks from theologians who profess and call themselves Christians, and who yet maintain that worst of all heresies, that during all the centuries that have elapsed and in all the countries of the world, God has left Himself without a witness, and has revealed Himself to one race only, the Jews of Palestine.
He never is crowned / With immortality, who fears to follow / Where airy voices lead.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve
If we have learnt to look upon Christianity, not as something unreal and unhistorical, but as an integral part of history, of the historical growth of the human race, we can see how all the searchings after the Divine or Infinite in man were fulfilled in the simple utterances of Christ. His preaching, we are told, brought life and immortality to light. Life, the life of the soul, and immortality, the immortality of the soul, were there and had always been there. But they were brought to light, man was made fully conscious of them, man remembered his royal birth, when the word had been spoken by Christ.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory, do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy.
On what does the Christian argument for Immortality really rest? It stands upon the pedestal on which the theologian rests the whole of historical Christianity--the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Natural Law, p. 234.
Unless a man can link his written thoughts with the everlasting wants of men, so that they shall draw from them as from wells, there is no more immortality to the thoughts and feelings of the soul than to the muscles and the bones.
Without a belief in personal immortality religion surely is like an arch resting on one pillar, like a bridge ending in an abyss.
They eat, they drink, and in communion sweet Quaff immortality and joy.
He ne'er is crown'd With immortality, who fears to follow Where airy voices lead.
There are, however, other arguments commonly brought forward in favour of the immortality of man, which are to my mind not only delusive but mischievous. The one is the notion that the moral government of the world is imperfect without a system of future rewards and punishments. The other is: that such a system is indispensable to practical morality. I believe that both these dogmas are very mischievous lies.
The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction.
Nations are only transitional forms of humanity; they must undergo obliteration, as do the transitional forms offered by the animal series. There is no more an immortality for them than there is an immobility for an embryo or any one of the manifold forms passed through in its progress of development.
Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.
God, from a beautiful necessity, is Love.
Man's grief is but his grandeur in disguise, and discontent is immortality.
Schmendrick stepped out into the open and said a few words. They were short words, undistinguished either by melody or harshness, and Schmendrick himself could not hear them for the Red Bull's dreadful bawling. But he knew what they meant, and he knew exactly how to say them, and he knew that he could say them again when he wanted to, in the same way or in a different way. Now he spoke them gently and with joy, and as did so he felt his immortality fall from him like an armour, or like a shroud.
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.
True immortality (of fame) is the immortality of the work done by man, which nothing can make undone, which lives, works on, grows on for ever. It is good to _ourselves_ to remember and honour the names of our ancestors and benefactors, but to them, depend upon it, the highest reward was not the hope of fame, but their faith in themselves, their faith in their work, their faith that nothing really good can ever perish, and that Right and Reason must in the end prevail.
Though inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither.
And on Ps. lxxviii. The spirit goeth and returneth not again, whereof some have taken occasion of error concerning the immortality of the soul; but the sense is that this spirit is the evil leaven, which accompanies man till death, and will not return at the resurrection.
Let those who believe in immortality enjoy their belief in silence, and give themselves no airs about it.
Philosophy can bake no bread; but she can procure for us God, freedom, immortality. Which, then, is more practical--philosophy or economy?
Work for immortality if you will: then wait for it.
~Immortality.~--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 thence arising; I believe and am firmly persuaded that a nature which contains so many things within itself cannot be mortal.--_Cicero._
Die Unsterblichkeit ist nicht jedermann's Sache=--Immortality is not every man's business or concern.
When the original oneness of earth and heaven, of the human and the divine natures, has once been discovered, the question of the return of the soul to God assumes a new character. It is no longer a question of an ascension to heaven, an approach to the throne of God, an ecstatic vision of God, and a life in a heavenly Paradise. The vision of God is rather the knowledge of the divine element in the soul, and of the consubstantiality of the divine and human natures. Immortality has no longer to be asserted, because there can be no death for what is divine, and therefore immortal, in man. There is life eternal and peace eternal for all who feel the divine Spirit as dwelling within them, and have thus become the children of God.
The sunshine is a glorious birth; But yet I know, where'er I go, That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.
Hard I strove To put away my immortality, Till my collected spirits swell'd my heart Almost to bursting; but the strife is past. It is a fearful thing to be a god, And, like a god, endure a mortal's pain; To be a show for earth and wondering heaven To gaze and shudder at! But I will live, That Jove may know there is a deathless soul Who ne'er will be his subject. Yes, 'tis past. The stedfast Fates confess my absolute will, — Their own co-equal.
The rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the rose.
Vain are the thousand creeds That move men's hearts: unutterably vain; Worthless as withered weeds, Or idle froth amid the boundless main, To waken doubt in one Holding so fast by Thine infinity; So surely anchored on The stedfast rock of immortality.
Poor in abundance, famished at a feast, man's grief is but his grandeur in disguise, and discontent is immortality.
The immortality of the soul is a matter of so great moment to us, it touches us so deeply, that we must have lost all feeling if we are careless of the truth about it. Our every action and our every thought must take such different courses, according as there are or are not eternal blessings for which to hope, that it is impossible to take a single step with sense or judgment, save in view of that point which ought to be our end and aim.
Philosophy can bake no bread; but she can procure for us God, Freedom, Immortality.
The Black Hole?” Grey asked, incredulously. “Nobody quotes The Black Hole, Dresden. Nobody even remembers that one.” “Hogwash. Ernest Borgnine, Anthony Perkins, and Roddy McDowall all in the same movie? Immortality.
The golden ripple on the wall came back again, and nothing else stirred in the room. The old, old fashion! The fashion that came in with our first garments, and will last unchanged until our race has run its course, and the wide firmament is rolled up like a scroll. The old, old fashion--Death! Oh, thank God, all who see it, for that older fashion yet--of Immortality!--_Dickens._
'T is immortality to die aspiring, As if a man were taken quick to heaven.
Therefore I do not here undertake to prove by natural reasons either the existence of God or the Trinity, or the immortality of the soul, nor anything of that sort, not only because I do not feel myself strong enough to find in nature proofs to convince hardened atheists, but also, because this knowledge without Jesus Christ is useless and barren. Though a man should be persuaded that the proportions of numbers are immaterial truths, eternal, and dependent on a first truth in whom they subsist, and who is called God, I should not consider him far advanced towards his salvation.
The doctrine of the conservation of energy tells neither one way nor the other [on the doctrine of immortality]. Energy is the cause of movement of body, i.e. things having mass. States of consciousness have no mass, even if they can be conceded to be movable. Therefore even if they are caused by molecular movements, they would not in any way affect the store of energy.
Covenanters._ Where music dwells Lingering and wandering on as loth to die, Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof That they were born for immortality.
It must be so,--Plato, thou reasonest well! Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, This longing after immortality? Or whence this secret dread and inward horror Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul Back on herself, and startles at destruction? 'T is the divinity that stirs within us; 'T is Heaven itself that points out an hereafter, And intimates eternity to man. Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought!
The photographer must have a negative, as he calls it, in order to furnish you with a picture. Now, the earthly cross is the negative from which the heavenly crown is to be made; the suffering and sorrow of the present time determining the glory, honor and immortality of the life to come.--_A. J. Gordon._
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
Our actions must clothe us with an immortality loathsome or glorious.--_Colton._
An artist is the magician put among men to gratify — capriciously — their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships — and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes — husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer.
Vor dem Tode erschrickst du? Du wunchest unsterblich zu leben! / Leb' im Ganzen! Wenn du lange dahin bist, es bleibt=--Art thou afraid of death? Thou wishest for immortality? Live in the whole! When thou art long gone, it remains.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Our dissatisfaction with any other solution is the blazing evidence of immortality.
Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.
It is beyond doubt that the mortality or immortality of the soul must make an entire difference in morals; yet philosophers have treated morality independently of the question. They discuss to pass the time.
It is only when the mind, which has taken shelter behind the walls of self-protection, frees itself from its own creations that there can be that exquisite reality. After all, these walls of self-protection are the creations of the mind which, conscious of its insufficiency, builds these walls of protection, and behind them takes shelter. One has built up these barriers unconsciously or consciously, and one’s mind is so crippled, bound, held, that action brings greater conflict, further disturbances. So the mere search for the solution of your problems is not going to free the mind from creating further problems. As long as this center of self-protectiveness, born of insufficiency, exists, there must be disturbances, tremendous sorrow, and pain; and you cannot free the mind of sorrow by disciplining it not to be insufficient. That is, you cannot discipline yourself, or be influenced by conditions and environment, in order not to be shallow. You say to yourself, “I am shallow; I recognize the fact, and how am I going to get rid of it?” I say, do not seek to get rid of it, which is merely a process of substitution, but become conscious, become aware of what is causing this insufficiency. You cannot compel it; you cannot force it; it cannot be influenced by an ideal, by a fear, by the pursuit of enjoyment and powers. You can find out the cause of insufficiency only through awareness. That is, by looking into environment and piercing into its significance there will be revealed the cunning subtleties of self-protection. After all, self-protection is the result of insufficiency, and as the mind has been trained, caught up in its bondage for centuries, you cannot discipline it, you cannot overcome it. If you do, you lose the significance of the deceits and subtleties of thought and emotion behind which mind has taken shelter; and to discover these subtleties you must become conscious, aware. Now to be aware is not to alter. Our mind is accustomed to alteration which is merely modification, adjustment, becoming disciplined to a condition; whereas if you are aware, you will discover the full significance of the environment. Therefore there is no modification, but entire freedom from that environment. Only when all these walls of protection are destroyed in the flame of awareness, in which there is no modification or alteration or adjustment, but complete understanding of the significance of environment with all its delicacies and subtleties—only through that understanding is there the eternal; because in that there is no “you” functioning as a self-protective focus. But as long as that self-protecting focus which you call the “I” exists, there must be confusion, there must be disturbance, disharmony, and conflict. You cannot destroy these hindrances by disciplining yourself or by following a system or by imitating a pattern; you can understand them with all their complications only through the full awareness of mind and heart. Then there is an ecstasy, there is that living movement of truth, which is not an end, not a culmination, but an ever-creative living, an ecstasy which cannot be described, because all description must destroy it. So long as you are not vulnerable to truth, there is no ecstasy, there is no immortality.