C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Immortality
Immortality—twin sister of Eternity.
All men desire to be immortal.
I am conscious of eternal life.
What is human is immortal!
Death from sin no power can separate.
A good man never dies.
I look through the grave into heaven.
Immortality is the glorious discovery of Christianity.
Work for immortality if you will: then wait for it.
The immortality of the soul is assented to rather than believed, believed rather than lived.
Let a disciple live as Christ lived, and he will easily believe in living again as Christ does.
All men’s souls are immortal, but the souls of the righteous are immortal and divine.
The hope of immortality makes heroes of cowards.
The seed dies into a new life, and so does man.
There is nothing strictly immortal but immortality.
Cold in the dust this perished heart may lie, but that which warmed it once shall never die.
To destroy the idea of the immortality of the soul is to add death to death.
The spirit of man, which God inspired, cannot together perish with this corporeal clod.
I have been dying for twenty years, now I am going to live.
Without a belief in personal immortality, religion surely is like an arch resting on one pillar, like a bridge ending in an abyss.
No one could ever meet death for his country without the hope of immortality.
May we be satisfied with nothing that shall not have in it something of immortality.
It is our souls which are the everlastingness of God’s purpose in this earth.
The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. It is marvelous, yet simple.
Whatsoever that be within us that feels, thinks, desires, and animates, is something celestial, divine, and consequently imperishable.
Everything is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. That the world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma.
Immortality o’ersweeps all pains, all tears, all time, all fears, and peals, like the eternal thunder of the deep, into my ears this truth: Thou livest forever!
I came from God, and I’m going back to God, and I won’t have any gaps of death in the middle of my life.
We do not believe immortality because we have proved it, but we forever try to prove it because we believe it.
Men of dissolute lives have little incentive to look forward to the hopes and glories of immortality. A due conception of these would be incompatible with such a life.
After the sleep of death we are to gather up our forces again with the incalculable results of this life, a crown of shame or glory upon our heads, and begin again on a new level of progress.
Faith in the hereafter is as necessary for the intellectual as the moral character; and to the man of letters, as well as to the Christian, the present forms but the slightest portion of his existence.
I feel that I was made to complete things. To accomplish only a mass of beginnings and attempts would be to make a total failure of life. Perfection is the heritage with which my Creator has endowed me, and since this short life does not give completeness, I must have immortal life in which to find it.
I long to believe in immortality.***If I am destined to be happy with you here—how short is the longest life. I wish to believe in immortality—I wish to live with you forever.
Earthly providence is a travesty of justice on any other theory than that it is a preliminary stage, which is to be followed by rectifications. Either there must be a future, or consummate injustice sits upon the throne of the universe. This is the verdict of humanity in all the ages.
How gloomy would be the mansions of the dead to him who did not know that he should never die: that what now acts shall continue its agency, and what now thinks shall think on forever!
How can it enter into the thoughts of man, that the soul, which is capable of such immense perfections, and of receiving new improvements to all eternity, shall fall away into nothing almost as soon as it is created?
The three states of the caterpillar, larva, and butterfly have, since the time of the Greek poets, been applied to typify the human being, its terrestrial form, apparent death, and ultimate celestial destination.
O, what a fate is that of man! As often as I hear of some undeserved wretchedness, my thoughts rest on that world where all will be made straight, and where the labors of the sorrowful will end in joy. O that we could call up in the hearts of the afflicted such thoughts!
Man is so created that as to his internal he cannot die; for he is capable of believing in God, and thus of being conjoined to God by faith and love, and to be conjoined to God is to live to eternity.
We are born for a higher destiny than that of earth; there is a realm where the rainbow never fades, where the stars will be spread before us like islands that slumber on the ocean, and where the beings that pass before us like shadows will stay in our presence forever.
There may be beings, thinking beings, near or surrounding us, which we do not perceive, which we cannot imagine. We know very little; but, in my opinion, we know enough to hope for the immortality, the individual immortality, of the better part of man.
It is only our mortal duration that we measure by visible and measurable objects; and there is nothing mournful in the contemplation for one who knows that the Creator made him to be the image of his own eternity, and who feels that in the desire for immortality he has sure proof of his capacity for it.
Immortality! We bow before the very term. Immortality! Before it reason staggers, calculation reclines her tired head, and imagination folds her weary pinions. Immortality! It throws open the portals of the vast forever; it puts the crown of deathless destiny upon every human brow; it cries to every uncrowned king of men, “Live forever, crowned for the empire of a deathless destiny!”
Doth this soul within me, this spirit of thought, and love, and infinite desire, dissolve as well as the body? Has nature, who quenches our bodily thirst, who rests our weariness, and perpetually encourages us to endeavor onwards, prepared no food for this appetite of immortality?
When I consider the wonderful activity of the mind, so great a memory of what is past, and such a capacity of penetrating into the future; when I behold such a number of arts and sciences, and such a multitude of discoveries thence arising,—I believe and am firmly persuaded that a nature which contains so many things within itself cannot be mortal.
And now have I finished a work which neither the wrath of Jove, nor fire, nor steel, nor all-consuming time can destroy. Welcome the day which can destroy only my physical man in ending my uncertain life. In my better part I shall be raised to immortality above the lofty stars, and my name shall never die.
Whence comes the powerful impression that is made upon us by the tomb? Are a few grains of dust deserving of our veneration? Certainly not; we respect the ashes of our ancestors for this reason only—because a secret voice whispers to us that all is not extinguished in them. It is this that confers a sacred character on the funeral ceremony among all the nations of the globe; all are alike persuaded that the sleep, even of the tomb, is not everlasting, and that death is but a glorious transfiguration.