Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Mary Baker Eddy

The basis of all health, sinlessness, and immortality is the great fact that God is the only Mind; and this Mind must not merely believed, but it must be understood.

God | Health | Immortality | Mind | God |

Hermann Cohen

Is there any doctrine of immortality that can say anything more simple yet definitive about man’s fate after death? He has come from God and returns to God. From the very beginning, man is bound up with God; and this bond continues to exist, unaffected by death which befalls the body only. God’s creation of man’s spirit, then, must be understood as a principle whose consequence is immortality.

Beginning | Body | Death | Doctrine | Fate | God | Immortality | Man | Spirit | Fate | God |

Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze

Greed for enlightenment and immortality is no different than greed for material wealth.

Enlightenment | Greed | Immortality | Wealth |

Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller

I believe in immortality of the soul because I have within me immortal longings. I believe that the state we enter after death is wrought of our own motives, thoughts, and deeds... I carry a magic light in my heart. Faith, the spiritual strong searchlight, illumines the way, and although sinister doubts lurk in the shadow, I walk unafraid towards the Enchanted Wood where the foliage is always green, where joy abides, where nightingales nest and sing, and where life and death are one in the Presence of the Lord.

Death | Deeds | Faith | Heart | Immortality | Joy | Life | Life | Light | Lord | Magic | Motives | Soul |

Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

The great lie about immortality destroys every kind of reason, every kind of naturalness in the instincts.

Immortality | Reason |

Albert Einstein

I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.

Authority | Ethics | Immortality | Individual |

Aeschylus NULL

Children are voices of immortality to a man, though he be dead.

Children | Immortality | Man |

Arthur W Osborn

To realize self as universal is the equivalent of immortality - a timeless state. The empirical ego then ceases like a ripple on the ocean.

Ego | Immortality | Self |

Arthur Compton, fully Arthur Holly Compton

Science cannot supply a definite answer to this question. Immortality relates to an aspect of life which is not physical, that is which cannot be detected and measured by any instrument, and to which the application of the laws of science can at best be only a well-considered guess.

Immortality | Life | Life | Question | Science |

François Guizot, fully François Pierre Guillaume Guizot

Neither experience nor science has given man the idea of immortality… The ideal of immortality rises from the very depths of his soul - he feels, he sees, he knows that he is immortal.

Experience | Immortality | Man | Science | Soul |

George Santayana

Sentimental time is a genuine, if poetical, version of the march of existence, even as pictorial space is a genuine, if poetical version of its distribution... the least sentimental term in sentimental time is the term now, because it marks the junction of fancy with action... For it is evident that actual succession can contain nothing but nows, so that now in a certain way is immortal. But this immortality is only a continual reiteration, a series of moments each without self-possession and without assurance of any other moment; so that if ever the now loses its indicative practical force and becomes introspective, it becomes acutely sentimental, a perpetual hope unrealized and a perpetual dying.

Action | Existence | Force | Hope | Immortality | Nothing | Self | Space | Time |

Henry Ward Beecher

No man is prosperous whose immortality is forfeited. No man is rich to whom the grave brings eternal bankruptcy. No man is happy upon whose path there rests but a momentary glimmer of light, shining out between clouds that are closing over him in darkness forever.

Darkness | Eternal | Grave | Happy | Immortality | Light | Man |

James Martineau

We do not believe in immortality because we have proved it, but we forever try to prove it because we believe it.

Immortality |

John Fiske

I believe in the immortality of the soul, not in the sense in which I accept the demonstrable truths of science, but as a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God’s work.

Faith | God | Immortality | Science | Sense | Soul | Work | Truths |