This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"I ask no risen dust to teach me immortality; I am conscious of eternal life." - Theodore Parker
"It’s a good thing when a man is different from your image of him. It shows he isn’t a type. If her were, it would be the end of him as a man. But if you can’t place him in a category, it means that at least a part of him is what a human being ought to be. He has risen above himself, he has a grain of immortality." - Boris Pasternak, fully Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
"At the end of our lives, after we have passed on, all that is left of us is our story… our ticket to immortality. Telling personal stories is also a bequest, a deeply meaningful and intimate legacy." - Richard “Rick” Stone
"In sickness the soul begins to dress herself for immortality." - Jeremy Taylor
"Above the senses is the mind. Above the mind is the intellect. Above the intellect is the ego. Above the ego is the unmanifested seed, the Primal Cause. And verily beyond the unmanifested seed is the self, the unconditioned Knowing whom one attains to freedom and achieves immortality." - Katha Upanishad
"The shallow… consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws, namely, the fusion and combination of the conscious will, or partial individual law, with those universal, eternal, unconscious ones which run through all Time, pervade history, prove immortality, give moral purpose to the entire objective world, and the last dignity to human life." -
"Resistance to empiricism is also due to a purely emotional shortcoming of the mode of reasoning it promotes: It is bloodless. People need more than reason. They need the poetry of affirmation; they crave an authority greater than themselves at rites of passage and other moments of high seriousness. A majority desperately wish for the immortality the rituals seem to underwrite." -
"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." - Albert Einstein
"Children are voices of immortality to a man, though he be dead." - Aeschylus NULL
"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." - Arthur Compton, fully Arthur Holly Compton
"To realize self as universal is the equivalent of immortality - a timeless state. The empirical ego then ceases like a ripple on the ocean." - Arthur W Osborn
"To wish to be better than the world is to be already on the threshold of immortality." - Bernard Bosanquet
"Money buys everything except love, personality, freedom, immortality, silence, peace." - Carl Sandburg
"When the dust of evening had come on, and not a sound disturbed the sacred stillness of the place, when the bright moon poured in her light on tomb and monument, on pillar, wall, and arch, and most of all (it seemed to them) upon her quiet grave - in that calm time, when all outward things and inward thoughts teem with assurances of immortality, and worldly hopes and fears are humbled in the dust before them, then, with tranquil and submissive hearts they turned away, and left the child with God." - Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens
"All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay and present praise." - Charles Caleb Colton
"The great difference between the real statesman 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 on expediency; the other acts on enduring principles and for immortality." - Edmund Burke
"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." - François Guizot, fully François Pierre Guillaume Guizot
"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." - George Santayana
"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." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Metaphysics has for the real object of its investigation three ideas only: God, Freedom and Immortality." - Immanuel Kant
"We do not believe in immortality because we have proved it, but we forever try to prove it because we believe it." - James Martineau
"Duty is the grandest of ideas, because it implies the idea of God, of the soul, of liberty, of responsibility, of immortality." - Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
"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." - John Fiske
"This longing after immortality? Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror, of falling into nought? Why shrinks the soul back on herself, and startles at destruction. ‘Tis the divinity that stirs within us; ‘tis heaven itself, that points out an hereafter, and intimates eternity to man." - Joseph Addison
"Those for whom the belief in immortality is most vivid are the most likely to practice the virtues which have a survival value and the least likely to deviate into either those virtues or those vices which are exclusively human." - Joseph Wood Krutch
"To a thong of aging infants, the consumer society holds out the promise of eternal youth, of an enchanted mirror in which the customer can see himself reflected in the transfiguring light of immortality." - Lewis H. Lapham
"Death is a great preacher of deathlessness. The protest of the soul against death, its reversion, its revulsion, is a high instinct of life. Dissatisfaction in his world who satisfieth the desire of every living thing has a grip on the future. As far as this goes, he has the least assurance of immortality who can be best satisfied with eating and drinking and “things”’ he has the surest hope of ongoings and far distances who does not live by brad alone, whose eye is looking over the shoulder of things, whose ear hears mighty waters rolling ever more, who has “hopes naught can satisfy below.” The limits of which death makes us aware, make us aware of life’s limitlessness. The wing cage knows it was meant for an ampler ether and diviner air." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"Should this my firm persuasion of the soul's immortality prove to be a mere delusion, it is at least a pleasing delusion, and I will cherish it to my last breath." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"When Judaism speaks of immortality… its primary meaning is that man contains something independent of the flesh and surviving it; his consciousness and moral capacity; his essential personality; a soul." - Milton Steinberg
"If something comes to life in others because of you, then you have made an approach toward immortality." - Norman Cousins
"One thought settles a life, an immortality." - Philip James Bailey
"Someone has said of a find and honorable old age, that it was the childhood of immortality." - Pindar NULL
"The belief in immortality depends finally upon the belief in God. If there exists a good and wise God, then there also exists a progress of mankind toward perfection; and if there be no progress of men towards perfection, then there cannot be a good and wise God. We cannot suppose that God’s moral government, the beginnings of which we see in the world and in ourselves, will cease when we leave this life." - Plato NULL
"Our dissatisfaction with any other solution is the blazing evidence of immortality." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I am a better believer, and all serious souls are better believers, in immortality than we can give grounds for." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God, do enter in that man with justice." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Our hope of immortality does not come from any religions, but nearly all religions come from that hope." - Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
"Never yet did there exist a full faith in the Divine Word (by whom light as well as immortality was brought into the world) which did not expand the intellect, while it purified the heart - which did not multiply the aims and objects of the understanding, while it fixed and simplified those of the desires and passions." -
"We find in God all the excellences of light, truth, wisdom, greatness, goodness and life. Light gives joy and gladness; truth gives satisfaction; wisdom gives learning and instruction; greatness excites admiration; goodness produces love and gratitude; life gives immortality and insures enjoyment." - William Jones, fully Sir William Jones of Nayland, aka Trinity Jones
"Someone has somewhere commented on the fact that millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." - Susan Ertz, aka Mrs. J.R. McCrindle
"Millions yearn for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." - Susan Ertz, aka Mrs. J.R. McCrindle
"It is the sense of boundless possibilities in man which justifies faith in personal immortality." - William Adams Brown
"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." - William Faulkner, fully William Cuthbert Faulkner
"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
"Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an after-life." - Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos