Best 621 quotes in «afterlife quotes» category

We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth.

We all waited on an afterlife. Only I planned to be alive for mine.

We don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.

War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.

We always have hoped that American diplomacy deploys itself in dialogue and persuasion rather than by ultimatums. That is the path we want in international relations.

We hoped against hope that what we had been doing was enough to prevent a riot. It was not enough.

We talk of the Turks, and abhor the cannibals; but may not some of them, go to heaven, before some of us?

We met with the poet Frank O'Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings.

When videotape came so a lot of movies that I do have a kind of afterlife in video. Things where movies that I do would come and go; they still come and go but you can go rent them and see them on TV.

When you have a regime that would be happier in the afterlife than in this life, this is not a regime that is subject to classic theories of deterrence.

Whether you reach a lot of people or have a profound impact on a few people, their memories of you are your afterlife.

Whether it is seen in personal terms or trans-personal terms, whether it is Heaven or Nirvana or Happy Hunting Ground or the Garden of Paradise, the weight and authority of tradition maintains that death is just an alteration in our state of consciousness, and that the quality of our continued existence in the afterlife depends on the quality of our living here and now.

Why is it that almost every human culture yet discovered has found it necessary to believe in an afterlife of some sort, but not a 'before-life?' Why are there so many versions of Heaven, Paradise and The Great Beyond, but almost none about The Great Before.

Work for your terrestrial life in proportion to your location in it, and work for your afterlife in proportion to your eternity in it.

You appreciate the little details in life once you realize how fragile it isYou respect the afterlife when you realize how powerful it is.

Why do people embrace God? In my opinion, belief in God and an afterlife is a necessary extension of man's need to feel that this life does not end with what we call death.

Afterlife exist in the unidentified substances.

After, Mam,' I say. 'What happens when you pass away?" I couldn't bear her being a ghost. Couldn't take her sitting in the kitchen, invisible. Couldn't take seeing Pop walk around her without touching her cheek, without bending to kiss her on her neck. 'It's like walking through a door, Jojo.' 'But you won't be no ghost, huh, Mam?' I have to ask even though I know the telling hurts her. Even though I feel like speaking's bringing her leaving closer. Death, a great mouth set to swallow. 'Can't say for sure. But I don't think so. I think that only happens when the dying's bad. Violent. The old folks always told me that when someone dies in a bad way, sometimes it's so awful even God can't bear to watch, and then half your spirit stays behind and wanders, wanting peace the way a thirsty man seeks water.' She frowns: two fishhooks dimpling down. 'That ain't my way.' 'That don't mean I won't be here, Jojo. I'll be on the other side of the door. With everybody else that's gone before. Your uncle Given, my mama and daddy, Pop's mama and daddy.' 'How?' 'Because we don't walk no straight lines. It's all happening at once. All of it. We all here at once. My mama and daddy and they mamas and daddies.' Mam looks to the wall, closes her eyes. 'My son.

All religions are man-made; God has not yet revealed himself beyond doubt to anybody.

An atheist is someone who is disappointed in his search of god. He is a man who strongly needed god but couldn't find him. Atheism is a cry of despair

And as Sean climbs into bed and closes his eyes, Mother comes, riding astride a lion the size of a house, blowing a clarion from a horn made out of a hollowed-out elephant's tusk. Her eyes have a faint crimson glow from the lasers that are mounted behind her irises, ready to fire at will. 'I touched a prince's chest today and made his heart stop,' she says. 'I'll do it again if I have to: they'll see what happens if anyone gets in my way. Good night, my son. Remember that I will always keep you safe; that I am always everywhere and always here.' 'Good night, Mom,' Sean says, and falls asleep. And Mother recedes, wise and beautiful and strong, a genius and a hero, a punisher of thieves and a slayer of wicked men, to watch over her son in all her different versions.

And since he cannot spend and use aright The little time here given him in trust, But wasteth it in weary undelight Of foolish toil and trouble, strife and lust, He naturally claimeth to inherit The everlasting Future, that his merit May have full scope; as surely is most just.

And what if there are only spiders there, or something of that sort

Anyone who craves an afterlife has not lived their life to the fullest.

Anyone who has physically incarnated on the Earth is energetically connected to the people they love, and to the Earth, indefinitely...

As far as I know, there’s nothing more dangerous than a man who doesn’t care if he lives or dies.

Ask very pointed questions. Sharp as sword blades, or laser blasts, if you catch my meaning.

What's important is that people give the kinds of reasons that can be understood and appraised apart from their particular comprehensive doctrines: for example, that they argue against physician-assisted suicide not just by speculating about God's wrath or the afterlife, but by talking about what they see as assisted suicide's potential injustices.

... You are the closest I will ever come to heaven, either here on Earth or in the afterlife, and I will not regret it, not even at the cost of your tears. So I go to my grave an unrepentant sinner, I’m afraid. There is no use in mourning one such as I, dearest... -Simon to Lucy in a letter before the last duel.

You know what the true definition of hell is? It's when you die, you get to meet the person you could have been.

Zen is to religion what a Japanese "rock garden" is to a garden. Zen knows no god, no afterlife, no good and no evil, as the rock-garden knows no flowers, herbs or shrubs. It has no doctrine or holy writ: its teaching is transmitted mainly in the form of parables as ambiguous as the pebbles in the rock-garden which symbolise now a mountain, now a fleeting tiger. When a disciple asks "What is Zen?", the master's traditional answer is "Three pounds of flax" or "A decaying noodle" or "A toilet stick" or a whack on the pupil's head.

About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about? Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.

After losing faith, even an atheist feels a yawning void in his soul that needs filling; there is nothing imaginable that he can fill with it. It was all along meant to be filled with the sacred, with the unknown and unknowable power. That's the curse or blessing of humanity

A joke is a witticism or play on words that’s meant to be funny. I say ‘meant to be’ because most jokes aren’t funny. They range between mildly amusing and grimace-inducingly annoying.

All atheists will go to heaven. If god exists, not believing in him does not take him away and he cannot justly condemn those who seek him earnestly and cannot find him. He would even reward their earnest search for him.

All he desired was to have a traumatic experience once in his life. Leukemia did not discriminate.

All religions are "revealed" and "inspired". After all nothing happens without the "will" of god.

All religions are guesswork

All those pathetic lonely people fooling one another into their clumsy games of afterlife and cosmic relevance just to avoid noticing the nauseating sadness of their real lives.

All three explanations—eternal life, reincarnation, and nothingness—are descriptions of the same reality.

A lot of people think death is nothingness, that somehow they'll stop existing. They're pretty surprised to find themselves still aware, thinking, seeing. Feeling emotions. Things they associate with life. So they're often confused. Other people have so much fear built up around the idea of death that it's too scary to contemplate, even after they've passed on." "What, they just ignore the evidence?" "You'd be surprised what people can make themselves believe.

An atheist is a disappointed true believer; he is an angry and hungry soul who has failed to find a real god to whom he can anchor his hope

And a soul would run by a living being, touch them softly on the shoulder or cheek, and continue on its way to heaven. The dead are never exactly seen by the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them. They speak of a chill in the air. The mates of the deceased wake from dreams and see a figure standing at the end of their bed, or in a doorway, or boarding, phantomlike, a city bus.

And I don't believe you dead. How can you be dead if I still feel you? Maybe, like God, you changed into something different that I'll have to speak to in a different way, but you not dead to me Nettie. And never will you be.

Animals are not supposed to have the power to reason and therefore don't care whether there is life after death. But imagine animals trying to cheer themselves up in the same way that our own ancestors did when faced with death, by believing that there is life after death. How would they resolve the problem that in the afterlife they might once more be eaten by man?

Arrête de pleurer. Ne sais-tu pas que tes larmes vont se changer en pluie, que la vapeur sortant de ta bouche va se changer en brume et que ton frère qui est mort ne pourra pas trouver son chemin vers sa future existence ?

As for karma itself, it is apparently only that which binds "jiva" (sentience, life, spirit, etc.) with "ajiva" (the lifeless, material aspect of this world) - perhaps not unlike that which science seeks to bind energy with mass (if I understand either concept correctly). But it is only through asceticism that one might shed his predestined karmic allotment. I suppose this is what I still don't quite understand in any of these shramanic philosophies, though - their end-game. Their "moksha", or "mukti", or "samsara". This oneness/emptiness, liberation/ transcendence of karma/ajiva, of rebirth and ego - of "the self", of life, of everything. How exactly would this state differ from any standard, scientific definition of death? Plain old death. Or, at most, if any experience remains, from what might be more commonly imagined/feared to be death - some dark perpetual existence of paralyzed, semi-conscious nothingness. An incessant dreamless sleep from which one never wakes? They all assure you, of course, that this will be no condition of endless torment, but rather one of "eternal bliss". Inexplicable, incommunicable "bliss", mind you, but "bliss" nonetheless. So many in the realm of science, too, seem to propagate a notion of "bliss" - only here, in this world, with the universe being some great amusement park of non-stop "wonder" and "discovery". Any truly scientific, unbiased examination of their "discoveries", though, only ever seems to reveal a world that simply just "is" - where "wonder" is merely a euphemism for ignorance, and learning is its own reward because, frankly, nothing else ever could be. Still, the scientist seeks to conquer this ignorance, even though his very happiness depends on it - offering only some pale vision of eternal dumbfoundedness, and endless hollow surprises. The shramana, on the other hand, offers total knowledge of this hollowness, all at once - renouncing any form of happiness or pleasure, here, to seek some other ultimate, unknowable "bliss", off in the beyond...

Atheists are the most honest of the human race. These people are unable to live a double life; they are unable to lie to themselves. Of course it's an evolutionary handicap, and if that handicap was widespread, our species would run the risk of extinction

At some indeterminate point in their life cycles, they cause themselves to be placed in artificial stone or wooden cocoons, or chrysalises. They have an idea that they will someday emerge from these in an altered state, which they symbolize with carvings of themselves with wings. However, we did not observe that any had actually done so.

Complainers Some people don't want to die Because you can't complain when you're dead I hope heaven is just a bunch of men lying around Ready to do what I say Ready with dicks and some such When I'm dead I won't be looking for a partner As much as a heavenly creature After all I was promised virgins But I don't care about that as much As the eyes looking into me in abandon Like porn but better Because there will be no screen There will be no holy divider then Between me and my brethren And the smell of sunshine Will emit from every brow That's the kind of thing I expect from death That's the kind of thing I'm waiting for