Best 621 quotes in «afterlife quotes» category

The last slide is Main Street at night, with the castle lit silver blue in the background. In the sky, fireworks are going off, cresting, cracking open the darkness, shooting long tendrils of colored light down to the buildings, way longer than I’ve ever seen for fireworks… I linger on this slide. I study that blue castle and those fireworks and realize that this is the image I’ve had in my head of Disneyland for all these years. Just like the beginning of the Wonderful World of Disney TV show. Maybe that’s why I wanted to head here this time. I know it’s ridiculous, but part of me wants to think that the world after this one could look like that. Like I said before, I stopped having notions about religion and heaven long ago—angels and harps and clouds and all that malarkey. Yet some silly, childish side of me still wants to believe in something like this. A gleaming world of energy and light, where nothing is quite the same color as it is on earth—everything bluer, greener, redder. Or maybe we just become the colors, that light spilling from the sky over the castle. Perhaps it would be somewhere we’ve already been, the place we were before we were born, so dying is simply a return. I guess is that were true then somehow we’d remember it. Maybe that’s what I’m doing with this whole trip—looking for somewhere that I remember, deep in some crevice of my soul. Who knows? Maybe Disneyland is heaven. Isn’t that the damnedest, craziest thing you’ve ever heard? Must be the dope talking. (pp.253-254)

The man wandered over to the table, crinkling his face. He still put on his old man look, from which he had when he died. "The last thing I remember I was shearing some sheep and . . . wait . . . I was choking on some wool." His hand went to his throat as if he still had it in there and his mouth gaped open in shock.

The more time you invest into studying religion, the more likely you are to disbelieve in the gods

The myth of purgatory is an allegory, a projection, from the present on to the future. This is why purgatory appeals to the imagination. It is our story. It is where we are now. If we are Christians, if we believe in the risen Jesus as Lord, if we are baptized members of his body, then we are passing right now through the sufferings which form the gateway to life.

The mystical non-sense of afterlife indeed gives solace to the mind in times of weakness, but why should the mind let its weakness be the fuel for primitiveness in the first place!

Then spoke Gangleri: 'There is a very large number of people in Val-hall. I declare by my salvation that Odin is a very great lord when he commands such a great troop. But what entertainment do the Einheriar have when they are not drinking?' High said: 'Each day after they have got dressed they put on war-gear and go out into the courtyard and fight each other and they fall each upon the other. This is their sport. And when dinner-time approaches they ride back to Val-hall and sit down to drink, as it says here: All Einheriar in Odin's courts fight one another each day. They select their victims and from battle ride, sit the more at peace together.

Theology is like assuming that there is a black cat in a dark room where in fact there is no black cat, and endeavoring to study the cat's properties and how it may have evolved from its ancestors.

...the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death.

The only consciousness that persists in the hereafter is the consciousness of pain.

The only satisfactory thing about death is that our knowledge about it is unsatisfactory.

The other sources, even when they mention Hel, rarely describe it. But when they do, it's cast in neutral or even positive terms. For example, the mention that the land of the dead is "green and beautiful" in Ibn Fadlan's account is mirrored in a passage from Saxo (The medieval Danish historian, as you likely recall). In Saxo's telling of the story of Hadding, the hero travels to the "Underworld" and finds a "fair land where green herbs grow when it is winter on earth." His companion even beheads a rooster just outside of that land and flings its carcass over the wall, at which point the bird cries out and comes back to life - a feat which is highly reminiscent of another detail from Ibn Fadlan, namely the beheading of a rooster and a hen whose bodies are then tossed into the dead man's boat shortly before it's set aflame. In both cases, the emphasis is on abundant life in the world of the dead, even when death and absence prevail on earth.

The real help victims of injustice need is to get the will, skill and resources to fight back. There may or may not be a hell in afterlife but suffering injustice quietly is a sin, punishment for which is a living hell here and now.

The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.

There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.

There are no signs of religion at all; no priest to hear my sins, no God to push open the pearly gates, nor a devil to welcome me with a pitchfork. All of this seems so meaningless.

There are five people you meet in heaven," the Blue Man suddenly said. "Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on Earth." Eddie looked confused. "People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless. "This is the greatest gift God can give you: To understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for.

There are two missions we are obligated to carry out during our life journey. The first, is to seek Truth throughout our lifetime. The second, is simply to be good. Engrave it in your mind that life is just one big board game where you have to make it from start to finish by being good. That is all you have to do. The hardest part, is dealing with all the obstacles that prevent smooth sailing. The trick is, to always strive to be the right person in all situations – regardless of personal cost to you. Your aim is to make sure the right book on your shoulder weighs more that the bad book on the left. The scales are real. Regardless of your chosen faith, there is a measurement system to be found in all of the world's religions. After all, does it make sense for all souls, good or bad, to end up in the same place? Of course not. To really secure the very best setting in the afterlife, the vibrations of your good deeds must surpass your death.

There is no murky pit of hell awaiting anyone ... Mind cannot arise alone without body, or apart from sinews and blood ... You must admit, therefore, that when then body has perished, there is an end also of the spirit diffused through it. It is surely crazy to couple a mortal object with an eternal...

There is no place so dark that light cannot lead the way.

There is nothing behind the curtains of religions, people put there whatever their imaginations can fathom

There is no such thing as fear until you allow it to enter your heart. If I told you what really happens to your soul when it is put to eternal sleep, you would not fear death; hence, you would never have fear — or fear Fear. But this is something I will share with you another day and time, in another story. We are taught to fear anything that can bring us closer to death — to keep us from taking huge leaps that involve risk. The only thing you should fear in this lifetime is not taking risks while you are living. I do not mean to go jump off a bridge. I mean, to go all out to reach your dreams, to dare to do things you typically would not do out of fear. Pain has a threshold and so does death. Fear neither, and never fear what has no right to be feared. Fear only the Almighty, for he is the only one who can terminate a soul forever. No man can do that. No leader can do that. Only the Creator can do that. As long as the heart is good, a soul can live forever. The body is simply a coating for the soul, and when you die, your soul takes the soul of your heart along with it. Love strengthens both, while fear cripples both. Starting today, train your mind and heart to reject fear. Once you reject fear, you will become the perfect candidate to receive and reflect Truth.

There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.

There's death and life, you see. We all shine on. A leaf, a star, a song, a laugh. Notice the little things, because somebody is reaching out to you. ...Somebody loves you.

There was no attack on religion because people were generally indifferent to religion. They were neither hot nor cold. They were the tepid, the materialistic, who hoped that by Sunday churchgoing they would be taking care of the afterlife, if there were an afterlife. Meanwhile they would get everything they could in this.

There was an evil wind howling through the undulating hills that night, rattling the loose panes in the windows of the cottage, keeping me up all night. Unbidden, the Lord’s prayer came to my lips, Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name… I said it moving my lips silently, as I had all those years ago, on my cold hard bed in the convent back in Calcutta. Praying didn’t come easily to me anymore, I had to hack out the words from deep within myself, but it brought me solace. It warmed a part of the soul that I long thought had shrivelled up and died. I grew up with prayer, it was difficult not to when one was growing up in a convent, surrounded by threats of hell and brimstone and the overwhelming guilt that one was inherently evil being drilled into our brains by the nuns. They might have been well meaning in order to keep a bunch of unruly children in line, but ended up scarring us with a concept of a vindictive God one could never really love.

There was no one she wanted to see more. There was no one she wanted to see less. "Why?" she whispered. "Why are you here?" "The winds blew," he said.

There was nothing else, there was nothing after, and the people who did believe in the great afterlife were just terrified children looking for the happy ending to a fairy-tale, a fairy–tale that contained more darkness than light, and the closer to the end they came the more terrified they became that there would be no light at the end of the story.

The sense of a soul and afterlife is an intuitive illusion.

The seed we bury in soil, Flourish, even after we die.

The shade of the sky changed ever so slightly in her peripheral vision. She raised her eyes from her toes to the horizon, to witness the sun’s last dance in the daylight as it began to descend slowly, magically into the distant sea. Exotic pastel hues of orange and fuchsia were now painted across the fading expression of the day. It was a calm yet isolating vision to take into her heart, for it made her feel exceedingly small in the grand scheme of things.

The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her culture. At the beginning of the journey to the next world, one's education and culture can either provide the greatest assistance, or else act as the greatest burden, to the person who has just died.

This concept of the afterlife really functions as a substitute for wisdom. It functions as a substitute for really absorbing our predicament, which is that everyone is going to die; there are circumstances that are just catastrophically unfair; evil sometimes wins and injustice sometimes wins, and that the only justice we are going to find in the world is the justice we make. We have an ethical responsibility to absorb this, really down to the soles of our feet. And this notion of an afterlife, of how it's all going to work out and its all part of god's plan, is a way of shirking that responsibility.

The strongest intimidation, by the way, is the invention of a hereafter with a hell everlasting.

The truth in death can only be found in the dying itself.

The vision people hold of the world to come is but a reflection, with predictable wishful distortions, of the world in which they live.

The world you are in – Is the true hell. The journey to Truth itself Is what quickens the heart to become lighter. The lighter the heart, the purer it is. The purer the heart, the closer to light it becomes. And the heavier the heart, The more chained to this hell It will remain.

The storage capacity of the average human brain is two-hundred and fifty-six exabytes. However, the average adult human only uses approximately one billionth of that storage space effectively. This means my knowledge capacity is approximately three thousand trillion times that of your average human.

The sun does not rise when you need it most. You rise instead.

The sun had now set the sky ablaze with glorious hues of orange. She squinted to focus in the brilliance and thoughts of distant fire breathing dragons lit up her imagination once again.

This I can declare: things that are in heaven are more real than things that are in the world.

Through discussions, reading, contemplation, and practice I've come to recognize the importance of subtle feelings and symbols. By paying attention to subtle energy, typically in the form of thoughts and feelings, we began to tap into our inner capacity to commune with those we've loved and lost, as well as other streams of consciousness and information.

Three, 300, or 3,000 - these are the number of unknown days, each far too little and yet too much at the same time, to see an irrevocably declined loved one languish and suffer, with that bittersweet release lingering in the doorway, but never quite being sent all the way in, to comfort and carry our loved one to that Better Place.” ― Connie Kerbs

Throughout Mesoamerica it was a common belief that a dog carried the soul of a newly deceased person across a body of water. According to the Aztecs, the first level of the Underworld was a place called Apanoayan (where one crosses the river) or Itzcuintlan (the Place of Dogs).

Today the journey is ended, I have worked out the mandates of fate; Naked, alone, undefended, I knock at the Uttermost Gate. Behind is life and its longing, Its trial, its trouble, its sorrow; Beyond is the Infinite Morning Of a day without a tomorrow. Go back to dust and decay, Body, grown weary and old; You are worthless to me from today— No longer my soul can you hold. I lay you down gladly forever For a life that is better than this; I go where partings ne'er sever You into oblivion's abyss. Lo, the gate swings wide at my knocking, Across endless reaches I see Lost friends with laughter come flocking To give a glad welcome to me. Farewell, the maze has been threaded, This is the ending of strife; Say not that death should be dreaded— 'Tis but the beginning of life.

To be honest that it holds hardship, failure, and collapse in life; however, paradise reward, afterlife.

Time is more than life, it is afterlife.

To Hell we have already been.

Too many times we're stuck trying to revive the dead when we can't even rouse the living." The woman added a paperboard coffee sleeve around Lexi's cup. "I think if we spent as much time worrying about the life prior to the afterlife, we would likely have no time to contemplate the latter. Heaven and Hell are right here, inside of us. We take them with us wherever we go." "That's pretty good." Lexi took a sip of the coffee, desperate for caffeine. "What are your views on relationships?" Sahar smiled. "Don't settle until you find the one who makes you want to say ya'aburnee." "What?" "It's Arabic for 'you bury me.' The hope that the person you love will outlive you so that you will be spared the pain of living without them.

True spiritual love is not a feeble imitation and anticipation of death, but a triumph over death, not a separation of the immortal form from the mortal, of the eternal from the temporal, but a transfiguration of the mortal into the immortal, the acceptance of the temporal into the eternal. False spirituality is a denial of the flesh; true spirituality is the regeneration of the flesh, its salvation, its resurrection from the dead.

Une vie où je pourrais me souvenir de celle-ci.