Great Throughts Treasury

"If there is a God, man's immortality is certain. If not, Immortality would not be worth having." - Edgar Sheffield Brightman

"To possess, is past the instant we achieve the joy - immortality contented were anomaly." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"You can believe in God without believing in immortality, but it is hard to see how anyone can believe in immortality and not believe in God." - Ernest Dimnet

"If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once. Moreover, there would be nothing immoral then, everything would be permitted. " - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski

"'Tis immortality to die aspiring." - George Chapman

"As the twentieth century began, science equaled a materialistic worldview. As the twenty-first century began, the worldview of science, at least of physics and astronomy, may have traded place with that of religion. Consider Einstein's famous equation E = mc2. Nothing of matter dies but continues on in another form, elsewhere. The church divines and theologians for two thousand years have devised arguments and "proofs" of immortality but nothing equal to this." - Huston Smith, fully Huston Cummings Smith

"It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one's germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!" - Irvin David Yalom

"If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error. " - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"

"The aim of a complete course of development is to divest the basic structures of any sense of exclusive self, and thus free the basic needs from their contamination by the needs of the separate self sense. When the basic structures are freed from the immortality projects of the separate self, they are free to return to their natural functional relationships... hungry, we eat; when tired, we sleep. The self has been returned to the Self, all self-needs have been met and discarded; and the basic needs alone remain." - Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II

"The family endures because it offers the truth of mortality and immortality within the same group. The family endures because, better than the commune, kibbutz, or classroom, it seems to individualize and socialize its children, to make us feel at the same time unique and yet joined to all humanity, accepted as is and yet challenged to grow, loved unconditionally and yet propelled by greater expectations. Only in the family can so many extremes be reconciled and synthesized. Only in the family do we have a lifetime in which to do it." - Letty Cottin Pogrebin

"Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit. The temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say, its eternal survival after death, is not only in no way guaranteed, but this assumption in the first place will not do so for us what we always tried to make it do. Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive forever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time." - Ludwig Wittgenstein, fully Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein

"Psychoanalysis arrived to save the human soul in a materialistic era sick with self-consciousness and threatened by loss of belief in immortality and in its public expression, religion. Its greatness resides in having done this in the mind-set of our era, not simply symbolizing the soul exoterically or concretizing it socially as in the past, but attempting to demonstrate it scientifically. But realistic psychology is the death knell of the soul, whose source, nature, and value lie precisely in the abstract, the unfathomable, and the esoteric." - Otto Rank, born Otto Rosenfeld

"Men passionately desire to live after death, but they often pass away without noticing the fact that the memory of a really good person always lives. It is impressed upon the next generation, and is transmitted again to the children. Is that not an immortality worth striving for? " - Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

"Children are the only form of immortality that we can be sure of." - Peter Ustinov, fully Sir Peter Alexander Ustinov

"Our doctrine of the immortality of the heavenly system rests on the firmest foundation once we have cited the sovereign agent, the soul, and considered, besides, the peculiar excellence of the bodily substance constituting the stars, a material so pure, so entirely the noblest, and chosen by the soul as, in all living beings, the determining principle appropriates to itself the choicest among their characteristic parts. No doubt Aristotle is right in speaking of flame as a turmoil, fire insolently rioting; but the celestial fire is equable, placid, docile to the purposes of the stars." - Plotinus NULL

"Posidonius found the idea of personal immortality absurd. Since the evil daimon is innate to the individual soul and absent from the World-Soul, the soul cannot become immortal by freeing itself of wrongdoing, for the individual soul as a whole cannot join the World-Soul. But the individual can through right ethics place the superior daimon in charge of all aspects of soul, subordinate the passional tendencies by withdrawing from the lower daimon, and thus engage in a microcosmic version of ceaselessly reducing chaos to kosmos. By assimilating the action of the higher daimonic aspect of soul to the celestial motion of the World-Soul, the individual merges the immortal part of the soul with the governing principle of the universe. The wise man does not seek immortality, for he knows there is that in him which is immortal. Perhaps Posidonius found in this standpoint the possibility of self-conscious, though not personal, immortality through cultivation of the highest in the individual. [paraphrased]" - Posidonius, aka Posidonius of Rhodes or Posidonius of Apameia (meaning "of Poseidon") NULL

"An immortality of pain and tears; an infinity of wretchedness and despair; the blackness of darkness across which conscience will forever shoot her clear and ghastly flashes--like lightning streaming over a desert when midnight and tempest are there; weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth; long, long eternity, and things that will make eternity seem longer--making each moment seem eternity--oh, miserable, condition of the damned!" - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

"How it happens that the pure and holy have such firm confidence in the immortality of the soul? Do they not by a deeper instinct or intuition, recognize their spirituality, and feel that they belong more to spirit than to flesh—more to eternity than to time?" - Robert James Turnbull

"One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr

"We should not seek immortality in reproduction. But if you contribute to the world`s culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a spark plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool." - Richard Dawkins

"I can reveal to you that I wished to die - For with much weeping she left me Saying: "Sappho - what suffering is ours! For it is against my will that I leave you." In answer, I said: "Go, happily remembering me For you know what we shared and pursued - If not, I wish you to see again our [former joys]... The many braids of rose and violet you [wreathed] Around yourself at my side And the many garlands of flowers With which you adorned your soft neck: With royal oils from [fresh flowers] You anointed [ yourself ] And on soft beds fulfilled your longing [For me] " - Sappho NULL

"I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be – in a light better than any light that ever shone – in a land no one can define or remember, only desire – and the forms divinely beautiful." - Edward Burne-Jones, fully Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet

"The Purusha with a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet, compasses the earth on all sides and extends beyond it by ten fingers' breadth." - Shvetashvatara Upanishad

"We should have with each person the relationship of one conception of the universe to another conception of the universe, and not to a part of the universe." - Simone Weil

"The first symptom of death is birth." - Stanislaw Lec, fully Stanisław Jerzy Lec, born Baron Stanisław Jerzy de Tusch-Letz

"The mental powers acquire their full robustness when the cheek loses its ruddy hue, and the limbs their elastic step; and pale thought sits on manly brows, and the watchman, as he walks his rounds, sees the student's lamp burning far into the silent night." - Thomas Guthrie

"If anything had or could have a value equal to gold and silver, it would require no tender law; and if it had not that value it ought not to have such a law; and, therefore, all tender laws are tyrannical and unjust and calculated to support fraud and oppression." - Thomas Paine

"The Theophilanthropists do not call themselves the disciples of such or such a man. They avail themselves of the wise precepts that have been transmitted by writers of all countries and in all ages." - Thomas Paine

"ust surrender to the wave of the Great Change. Neither happy nor afraid. And when it is time to go, then simply go - without any unnecessary fuss." - Ch'ien, fully T'ao Chien or Tao Qian, aka Tao Yuan-ming NULL

"That the sage is a sage is due solely to the fact that his mind is completely dominated by heaven-given principles, and not hampered by passion." - Wang Yang-Ming or Yangming, aka Wang Shouren or Wang Shou-jen, courtesy name Bo'an

"And yet I adore him. I think he's quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible and there is absolutely nobody like him." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"I became aware of the world's tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation, and I realized that the joy I sought in you was not only secreted within you, but breathed around me everywhere, in the speeding street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted skirt, in the metallic yet tender drone of the wind, in the autumn clouds bloated with rain. I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but the shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed upon us and unappreciated." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another's child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine; Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque part o? nous ne serons jamais s?par?s; Ohio? The wilds of Massachusetts? No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn--even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice left but confess – he was a woman." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"One should, perform karma with nonchalance without expecting the benefits because sooner of later one shall definitely gets the fruits." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

"Talkative persons easily step into scandal mongering. Too much talk and a tongue addicted to scandal are twins; they work together and in unison." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The insane, for the most part, reason correctly, but from false principles, while they do not perceive that their premises are incorrect." - Tryon Edwards

"Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility." - Hu Shih, or Hú Shì

"A large portion of human beings live not so much in themselves as in what they desire to be. - They create an ideal character the perfections of which compensate in some degree for imperfections of their own." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"I do not believe that the basic ideas of the theory of relativity can lay claim to a relationship with the religious sphere that is different from that of scientific knowledge in general. I see this connection in the fact that profound interrelationships in the objective world can Ije comprehended through simple logical concepts. To be sure, in the theory of relativity this is the case in particularly full measure." - Albert Einstein

"Enough! we're tired, my heart and I. We sit beside the headstone thus, and wish that name were carved for us. The moss reprints more tenderly the hard types of the mason's knife, as Heaven's sweet life renews earth's life with which we're tired, my heart and I... In this abundant earth no doubt is little room for things worn out: disdain them, break them, throw them by! And if before the days grew rough we once were loved, used, - well enough, I think, we've fared, my heart and I." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"A little Madness in the Spring is wholesome even for the King." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"Bless God, he went as soldiers, his musket on his breast— grant God, he charge the bravest of all the martial blest! Please God, might I behold him in epauletted white—I should not fear the foe then—I should not fear the fight!" - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"My life had stood--a Loaded Gun-- In Corners--till a Day The Owner passed--identified-- And carried Me away-- And now We roam in Sovereign Woods-- And now We hunt the Doe-- And every time I speak for Him-- The Mountains straight reply-- And do I smile, such cordial light Upon the Valley glow-- It is as a Vesuvian face Had let its pleasure through-- And when at Night--Our good Day done-- I guard My Master's Head-- 'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's Deep Pillow--to have shared-- To foe of His--I'm deadly foe-- None stir the second time-- On whom I lay a Yellow Eye-- Or an emphatic Thumb-- Though I than He--may longer live He longer must--than I-- For I have but the power to kill, Without--the power to die." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance" - Eric Temple Bell

"The best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith" - Ernest Becker

"When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being." - Ernest Becker

"My security comes from who God is, not from how I feel. Discipleship is a decision to live by what I know about God, not by what I feel about him or myself or my neighbors." - Eugene Peterson