Immortality Quotes

“The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that ‘black hole’ is infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions—nothing but the fixity of the pensive gaze.

With the gods gone, and Christ not yet come, there was a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur.”
― Flaubert Gustave

“I used to be afraid about what people might say or think after reading what I had written. I am not afraid anymore, because when I write, I am not trying to prove anything to anyone, I am just expressing myself and my opinions. It’s ok if my opinions are different from those of the reader, each of us can have his own opinions. So writing is like talking, if you are afraid of writing, you may end up being afraid of talking”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“It's all a series of serendipities
with no beginnings and no ends.
Such infinitesimal possibilities
Through which love transcends.”
― Ana Claudia Antunes, The Tao of Physical and Spiritual

“We’re all immortal, as long as our stories are told.”
― Elizabeth Hunter, The Scribe

“The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.”
― George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Five Volumes in One

“The only thing wrong with immortality is that it tends to go on forever.”
― Herb Caen

“The power of a writer is that he is a god of sorts. He can create his own worlds and populate them with his own people, all by the powers of his imagination. It's the closest a man can come close to the gods. No wonder the most successful writers are considered immortals”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“Most sane human beings’ chances of being alive in a thousand years’ time are a hundred times higher than their chances of being sincerely happy for at least ten consecutive days.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“If I were to believe in God enough to call him a murderer, then I might also believe enough that he, as a spirit, exists beyond death; and therefore only he could do it righteously. For the physical being kills a man and hatefully sends him away, whereas God, the spiritual being, kills a man and lovingly draws him nigh.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Immortality like this is about as useful as sunscreen on a submarine.”
― Elizabeth Marx, All's Fair in Vanity's War

“They all seem infected with a vivaciousness that isn't common in our compound, and there are more smiles on their faces than I've ever seen at once. And yet as I watch them, I feel more intensely than ever the knowledge that I'm not one of them. For these moral humans, birthdays are a kind of countdown to the end, the ticking clock of a dwindling life. For me, birthdays are notches on an infinite timeline. Will I grow tired of parties one day? Will my birthday become meaningless? I imagine myself centuries from now, maybe at my three-hundredth birthday, looking all the way back to my seventeenth. How will I possibly be happy, remembering the light in my mother's eyes? The swiftness of Uncle Antonio's steps as he dances? The way my father stands on edge of the courtyard, smiling in that vague, absent way of his?

The scene shifts and blues in my imagination. As if brushed away by some invisible broom, these people whom I've known my entire life disappear. The courtyard is empty, bare, covered in decaying leaves. I imagine Little Cam deserted, with everyone dead and gone and only me left in the shadows.

Forever.”
― Jessica Khoury, Origin

“Men may perish, but the world will neither celebrate nor mourn. It will go on.' His smile thinned. 'Would you like to know how?'
'No.'
'Animals will swell to fill the void left by men," he told her. 'And over-swell it, perhaps. There will be other extinctions and other recoveries. The sky will clear, but those who see it will not marvel at its many colors. Those ruins will collapse, burying treasures like this-' He waved at the walls. '-and this-' He picked up the spoon from her coffee tray and tossed it down again with a clatter. '-forever, but the world will go on. Years become centuries so easily when no one is there to count them. Centuries become millennia. The forests will reclaim the lands that Men have razed. Rivers will carve canyons across the scars left by this fallen cities. Mountains will rise up, trapping seas to dry under and uncaring sun and leaving the bones of whales to bleach in the newborn deserts for no one to find, no one to be inspired by thoughts of giants and dragons. And still the worlds will go on, and I will go on with it through ages that can only be measured by the coming and going of glaciers. The stars themselves will shift in the heavens and no one will be there to invent names for their new alignments or remember the stories of the old ones, no one but me. In time, the sun itself will begin to cool. Here on Earth, the world goes on and on as its remaining life passes through its last changes and dies away. It will be quiet. And lonely.' His mouth curved into a bitter line. 'But I'll live.'
'Stop it,' Lan whispered through numb lips.
'I read once that the sun will someday swell and engulf this world before it burns itself out. Perhaps I will finally die with it. Or perhaps I' will continue to endure... my ashes pulled eternally apart through the frozen vacuum of space, and I with no more mouth to scream... still alive.”
― R. Lee Smith, Land of the Beautiful Dead

“While death and darkness girdle me
I grope for immortality.”
― Lionel Johnson

“Tell me, before you call us servants, who served whom? And who, I wonder, in your generations, will immortalize you?”
― Peter Shaffer, Amadeus

“Think then what it is to live on here eternally and yet be human; to
age in soul and see our beloved die and pass to lands whither we may
not hope to follow; to wait while drop by drop the curse of the long
centuries falls upon our imperishable being, like water slow dripping
on a diamond that it cannot wear, till they be born anew forgetful of
us, and again sink from our helpless arms into the void unknowable.”
― H. Rider Haggard, Ayesha: The Return of She

“To love, to live, to feel so much that your world keeps spinning, faster and faster, in that wonderful, chaotic mess of humanity that you’d so hastily give up. Immortality is overrated. It is nothing but the ability to live through it all and not experience a single thing, to eat everything without tasting it at all." Isak’s eyes shone with a desperate need. He wanted, more than anything it seemed, to be like me, when all I wanted was to be like him.”
― Sophia Whittemore, The Funnyman

“Stories are all we humans have to make us immortal.”
― Salley Vickers, Where Three Roads Meet: The Myth of Oedipus

“Civilization could not exist without tremors of desire and without the counteracting, negation force of disciplined denial. Nor would the gyratory pulsations of a lively civilization exist devoid of the convulsive chemistry of union and repellency. We are born with a desire to be immortal. Cursed with the knowledge that we must die, people live their orthodox lives out by displaying reckless abandon as to the outcome of human life or nervously hounded by utter despondency nipping their heels. How we resolve this decidedly human complex of carrying out our daily lives while burden by our inescapable mortality determines our essential character. The collation of similar values adopted by our community determines who we are as a people.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster

“If the Earth were not subject to any change I would consider the Earth a big but useless body in universe, paralyzed...superfluous and unnatural.Those who so exalt incorruptibility, unchangeability and the like, are, I think, reduced to saying such things both because of inordinate desire they have to live for a long time and because of the terror they have of death...they do not realize that if men were immortal, they would have never come into the world.”
― Galileo Galilei

“In years past, a person died, and eventually all those with memories of him or her also died, bringing about the complete erasure of that person's existence. Just as the human body returned to dust, mingling with atoms of the natural world, a person's existence would return to nothingness.

How very clean.

Now, as if in belated punishment for the invention of writing, any message once posted on the Internet was immortal. Words as numerous as the dust of the earth would linger forever in their millions and trillions and quadrillions and beyond.”
― Minae Mizumura, Inheritance from Mother

“I'm immortal. You consider the future because one day you'll die. I don't have that uncertainty." - Kiaran”
― Elizabeth May, The Falconer

“They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I think the same could be said for time.”
― Jake Vander Ark, The Day I Wore Purple

“O, never from the memory of my heart
Your dear, paternal image shall depart,
Who while on earth, ere yet by death surprised,
Taught me how mortals are immortalized;
How grateful am I for that patient care
All my life long my language shall declare.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Some might claim that like the secret of flying is missing the ground, the secret to immortality is simply not dying.”
― Christina Engela, For Love of Leelah

“For what blessing may a man hope for but
An immortality in
The loving vigilance of death.”
― Robert Penn Warren

“Most men who very seldom say a moral thing, very seldom do a wrong thing. Their immorality is simply a pose, an image that serves to differentiate them from the ‘morally perfect masses’. And as opposite to it, most men who very frequently say a moral thing, very frequently do a wrong thing. Their morality is simply a mask in order to gain the respect of the masses.”
― Elmar Hussein

“If they succeed, it will not matter if Man becomes immortal.
He will have nothing to live for.”
― James Edwin Gunn, The Immortals

“If you're in your 20s now, by the time you're 75, you'll be able to live 'til you're 150. By the time you're 150 you'll be able to live 'til you're 300. See you at your 1000th birthday party!”
― Neil A. Hogan

“I don’t need immortality. The fear of death keeps a girl sharp. It helps us remember that what we do here, now, matters. What good is immortality, if you’re just a dirty little despot in some shitty corner of the world?”
― C.M. Hayden, The Stars That Form Us

“Every living is immortal in guise of mortal body.”
― Akshmala Sharma