Best 621 quotes in «afterlife quotes» category

We are like other animals; we live and die as they do. If there is any afterlife, I believe we are in together.

We cannot leave, but that does not mean we will stay—stay in the same place in the same system that profits from recycling us at the bottom. We will disrupt it. Build our own space that will swallow bits and pieces of theirs. We were waiting for permission, waiting for the Darkness to acknowledge our worth, but we’ve always had the power to make it come to be.

We are the voices in the shadows, Between the light and shade, Betwixt life and restful death, In the dark periphery of the unseen. We’re here, At the edges. We are the villainous punished, The innocent murdered or abandoned, Our lives ended by foul means, or unspeakable deeds. We are your lovers long gone; your siblings forsaken. Can you hear us? At the edges From the Foreword of Cautionary Tales - by Emmanuelle de Maupassant

We don’t see the life after life as it truly is, because in our eyes it conforms to our mechanics of nature.

We are not forgotten by those we have loved, and they do visit us more times than we consciously know. I hope my story provides some comfort to those who have experienced the loss of someone they love deeply. “Paula Lenz’s book shows how the deepest grief can unlock the greatest spiritual treasures. The story of how the death of her beloved brother Don also provided her — and us — with inconvertible evidence of life after death should convince any skeptic that we live after we die. Driving into Infinity will take you on a riveting journey of self-discovery.” -Kenneth Ring, Ph.D., Author of Lessons from the Light

WE CONTINUE TO DWELL AMONG THE LIVING AFTER WE DIE. WE LIVE ON IN MINDS, HEARTS AND LIPS.

We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.

Well, for one, you walk around like you’re so much better than everyone else. We’re all a bunch of soulless animals or somethin’ in your eyes, I guess. You’re the high and mighty one and I ain’t fit to drink your piss.

Well one tiny poisonous spider can kill a very large man if it bites him in the right place.

Well, suppose we remain upon earth, after all? Suppose we bravely accept the death of our dreams at the same time as the death of our bodies? This beyond is decidedly uncertain, quite vague and mobile. I do not believe that it exists everywhere; I believe that it is nowhere except in our infantile imaginations. Born with us, it will end at the same moment that we do, to be born anew in our posterity. The beyond is the earthly tomorrow, as we bequeath it to our heirs and as they modify it by their efforts and in accordance with their tastes.

Well, there’s another place—another country, isn’t there? We go there when we sleep; at other times, too; and when we die.

We live and we die, but we are made of sterner stuff. The carbon atoms in our fingernails, the calcium in our bones, the iron atoms in our blood -- all the countless trillions of atoms of which we are made -- are ancient objects. They existed before us, before the Earth itself, in fact. And after each of us dies, they will depart from our bodies and do other things. Forever.

Well you know what they say. It’s always raining somewhere.

Were the happiness of the next world as closely apprehended as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdom to live; and unto such as consider none hereafter, it must be more than death to die, which makes us amazed at those audacities that durst be nothing and return into their chaos again. Certainly such spirits as could contemn death, when they expected no better being after, would have scorned to live, had they known any.

What are those glorious dots? Those, dear one, are forget-me-nots!

What I’m trying to get across is, we all suffer feelings of loss and despair when grieving for a friend or relative that has transitioned, but after learning and knowing that no one that goes home is “lost”, but is right where they should be, it means that we often create our own victimhood by retreating into an all-encompassing state of grief.

What if a demon crept after thee into thy loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to thee: "This life, as thou livest it at present, and hast lived it, thou must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to thee again, and all in the same series and sequence—and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and thou with it, thou speck of dust!"—Wouldst thou not throw thyself down and gnash thy teeth, and curse the demon that so spake? Or hast thou once experienced a tremendous moment in which thou wouldst answer him: "Thou art a God, and never did I hear anything so divine!" If that thought acquired power over thee as thou art, it would transform thee, and perhaps crush thee; the question with regard to all and everything: "Dost thou want this once more, and also for innumerable times?" would lie as the heaviest burden upon thy activity! Or, how wouldst thou have to become favourably inclined to thyself and to life, so as to long for nothing more ardently than for this last eternal sanctioning and sealing?

What is the point of our lives? There isn't any. I can't seem to decide how much horror and how much joy lies within that simple truth, but I know it is both of those things at once.

We were sitting at the bar on the ninth floor. No alcohol served after dark––and it was always after dark. I watched two men stumble across the dance floor, arms entwined, faces slack with boredom. The pianist plowed through a joylessly jaunty tune, the musical equivalent of a man dancing at gunpoint. My drinking companion grinned.

What is needed is not that a religion be true, meaning that what it claims exist beyond the ink it is written with in a holy book. That is hard to prove. What is important is that a religion be a good system to help us mere mortal deal with our short and troubled life in the universe. Whether what we hope for in the afterlife materializes or not is not important, what is important is that we believe it will materialize and that gives us hope.

What's the point of the afterlife if it's so much like being alive?

What’s it gonna be like, dying? To go to sleep and never, never, never wake up. Well, a lot of things it’s not gonna be like. It’s not going to be like being buried alive. It’s not going to be like being in the darkness forever. I tell you what — it’s going to be as if you never had existed at all. Not only you, but everything else as well. That just there was never anything, there’s no one to regret it — and there’s no problem. Well, think about that for a while — it’s kind of a weird feeling when you really think about it, when you really imagine. [The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are ]

When I came out into the outside room again, I saw her shoe still lying there, where it had come off in the course of our brief wrestle. It looked so pathetic there by itself without an owner, it looked so lonely, it looked so empty. Something made me pick it up arid take it in to her. Like when someone's going away, you help them on with their coat, or their jackboots, or whatever it is they need for going away. I didn't try to put it back on her, I just set it down there beside her close at hand. You're going to need this, I said to her in my mind. You're starting on a long walk. You're going to keep walking from now on, looking for your home. I stopped and wondered for a minute if that was what happened to all of us when we crossed over. Just keep walking, keep on walking, with no ahead and no in-back-of; tramps, vagrants in eternity. With our last hope and horizon - death - already taken away. In the Middle Ages they had lurid colors, a bright red hell, an azure heaven shot with gold stars. They knew where they were, at least. They could tell the difference. We, in the Twentieth, we just have the long walk, the long walk through the wispy backward-stringing mists of eternity, from nowhere to nowhere, never getting there, until you're so tired you almost wish you were alive again. ("Life Is Weird Sometimes" - first chapter of unpublished novel THE LOSER)

When I sit down beside my mother, she shivers. When I touch Ellie's shoulders, she smiles like she knows it's me. Maybe she does. Who could have told me that the wind was some passed-on soul stopping to touch your face, your hands, your hair. Who knew a surprising cool breeze was someone who had gone before you saying, 'You're loved.

When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there’s something within me that’s ready to believe in life after death. And it’s not the least bit interested in whether there’s any sober evidence for it.

What's afterlife?" Asher asked, sincerely, indicating a trio of passing shoppers laden with brightly colored bags, who turned up their noses. "There's only life.

...when she had those dreams at night, he was there, as if he had never died, although she knew, even in the dream, that he had. One day she would join him, she knew, whatever people said about how we came to an end when we took our last breath. Some people mocked you if you said that you joined others when your time came. Well, they could laugh, those clever people, but we surely had to hope, and a life without hope of any sort was no life: it was a sky without stars, a landscape of sorrow and emptiness.

When we were alive, they told us that when we died we'd go to heaven. And they said that heaven was a place of joy and glory and we would spend eternity in the company of saints and angels praising the Almighty, in a state of bliss. That's what they said. And that's what led some of us to give our lives, and others to spend years in solitary prayer, while all the joy of life was going to waste around us and we never knew. Because the land of the dead isn't a place of reward or a place of punishment, it is a place of nothing. The good come here as well as the wicked, and all of us languish in this gloom forever, with no hope of freedom, or joy, or sleep, or rest, or peace. But now this child has come offering us a way out and I'm going to follow her. Even if it means oblivion, friends, I'll welcome it, because it won't be nothing. We'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glistening in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.

While many ethnic and religious groups are mainly focused on the afterlife and downplaying this world, Jews view wealth and success as a blessing and gift from God.

Why do religious believers hate unbelievers? The feel threatened by them, they feel besieged by them. Religions consider themselves as separate tribes in their own rights and feel like unbelievers will one day overrun their strongholds

Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour--landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard... But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants?

You are dead- what am I speaking to?

When he finally fell asleep, his dreams contained no stories at all, but only the hard stones of thoughts: the unimaginably unlikely coincidence of being alive at the same time as the love of your life, the frequency with which a person was expected to bear the body and the burden of someone else, the idiocy of thinking that kindness can protect the person who is kind, and worst of all, the bottomless pit of a truth that he had suddenly, sickeningly seen: that the world to come that his parents had always talked about was not an afterlife at all, but simply this world, to come--the future world, your own future, that you were creating for yourself with every choice you made in it.

When you die, you don't.

Wherever Jordan's going - and I do believe we all go somewhere - think of it as the light that will bring him home.

Why doesn't the pope convert to Calvinism? Why doesn't the Dalai Lama, convert to Christianity, why doesn't Billy Graham convert to Islam, Why doesn't the Ayatollahs convert to Buddhism, Why isn't Buddhism swept away? Religious leaders know that all religions are equal; they know that no one of them has the monopoly to the knowledge of God. They know that each religion is trying to find the hidden God and that no one religion can claim to have found him beyond doubt. That's why they remain where they are and respect each other.

Why have You made us the saddest animal? (...) He cannot do it, Henry, that is why. He can’t continue us. All He can do is try to make us happy that we die. Really, He’s a pretty good fellow.

Yes, stop your beliefs for a few moments now and then and Be-Life.

You can't have it both ways. Either you believe in my god or you go to hell

You hear stories like that all your life and think: cool, a ghost bus. But now we have to look at this stuff analytically... a ghost bus?! The “ghost” of a motor vehicle? A public conveyance, presumably, which didn't head towards the light, move on to join the choir invisible in... bus heaven, the great terminus in the sky, where all good buses go when they... I don't know, break down, but instead is doomed to … drive eternally the streets of Earth! How can there be a ghost bus?!

You know? Ain’t it ironic how we live our entire lives without the luxury of time, only to spend an eternity in death.

You need to be greedy or ignorant to truly want to live forever.

You are pretty healthy, and maybe there isn't any hell after all." "Oh, but there is Rhett! You know there is!" "I know there is but it's right here on earth. Not after we die. There's nothing after we die, Scarlett. You are having your hell now.

You only live once. Maybe twice.

You take away my golden dreams and my visions of paradise, in its place you wake me up and hand me your reasons and facts and crude reality. You have ruined my life. If I commit murder or hang myself, let the god I used to pray to repay you in full.

Actually, I have only two things to worry about now: afterlife and reincarnation.

All I really had was a suitcase and my drums. So I took them up to Seattle and hoped it would work.

Your pets will never judge you for helping them leave a body that has failed them. To them it is the ultimate gift of love.

And I, a materialist who does not believe in the starry heaven promised to a human being, for this dog and for every dog I believe in heaven, yes, I believe in a heaven that I will never enter, but he waits for me wagging his big fan of a tail so I, soon to arrive, will feel welcomed.

And a friend of mine in the Christys, we used to sit up at night and talk and read and wonder if reincarnation, and if it wasn't reality, what would happen to the human spirit when the body dies? Is there an afterlife? Just questions like that.