CHAPTER TWELVE

The postulate of immortality... must lead to the supposition of the existence of a cause adequate to this effect; in short, it must postulate the existence of a God.

Immanuel Kant

When Judaism speaks of immortality... its primary meaning is that man contains something independent of the flesh and surviving it; his consciousness and moral capacity, his essential personality; a soul.

Milton Steinberg

In the heaven-world there is no fear; thou art not there, O Death, and no one is afraid on account of old age. Leaving behind both hunger and thirst, and out of the reach of sorrow, all rejoice in the world of heaven.

Katha Upanishad

Salvation is not putting a man into Heaven, but putting Heaven into man.

Maltbie D. Babcock

Socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism today, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from earth but to set up Heaven on earth.

Fedor M. Dostoievski

That which has all power; it makes heaven and it makes hell; for there is no hell but where the will of the creature is turned from God, nor any heaven but where the will of the creature works with God.

William Law

America... may be described as a land where the Common Man is perpetually bidding his fellow to go to hell, and at the same time doing his best to get him into heaven.

Lawrence P. Jacks

Arabs are not heathens. Idolatry was eliminated from their speech and hearts long ago, and they affirm properly the unity of God... Those who worship in mosques today have their hearts directed only toward heaven.

Moses Maimonides

There is a land of pure delight,
Where saints immortal reign;
Infinite day excludes the night,
And pleasures banish pain.

Isaac Watts

God created man to be immortal, and made him to be an image of his own eternity.

Apocrypha: Wisdom of Solomon, II, 23.

The source of joy. There is no joy in the finite.
Infinite is immortal.

Chandogya Upanishad.

The heart's immortal thirst to be completely known and all forgiven.

Henry Van Dyke

Every vocation is ultimately founded on the salutary selfishness by which an individual, despite the whole world, seeks to save his own immortal soul.

M. Raymonds

The real "opium of the people," distracting men's minds from their essential task... the... myth of an earthly paradise.

Jean Danielou

A place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself... the paradise of the worthless.

George Bernard Shaw

A Socialist's Paradise, where equality prevails, everything is supplied, and competition is eliminated.

Elbert Hubbard

That inner room which is man's paradise.

Anon.

Same old slippers,
Same old rice,
Same old glimpse of
Paradise.

William J. Lampton

That which divides the universe into two: this world for the gentiles - the hereafter for the Jews.

David Ben-Gurion

Our portion lest we should make this world our rest and not hope for the hereafter.

Saint John Chrysostom

The view of life that limits itself not to the material in exclusion of the spiritual, but to the human here and now in exclusion of man's relation to God and hereafter.

Catholic Bishops of the United States, 1947.

There is no free will in the human mind: it is moved to this or that volition by some cause, and that cause has been determined by some other cause, and so on infinitely.

Baruch Spinoza

A disposition inherent in changeable things, by which Providence connects all things in their due order.

Boethius

One who doesn't know whether God exists, but is afraid to say so loudly in case God might hear him.

Eugene E. Brussell

God... all else is relative.

Will Herberg

To befriend any one on God's account, and to be at enmity with whosoever is the enemy of God.

Mohammed

A man who doesn't know whether there is A God or not, doesn't know whether he has a soul or not, doesn't know whether there is a future life or not, doesn't believe that anyone else knows any more about these matters than he does, and thinks it a waste of time to try to find out.

Richard Henry Dana

There are only practical atheists. Their atheism consists, not in the denying the truth of God's existence, but in failing to realize God in their actions.

Jules Lagneau

A man related to God without being conscious of the relation.

Anon.

To love God by loving man.

Adapted from Saint Francis de Sales

Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither.

Walt Whitman

What shall be, shall be.

Anon.

Unhappy men who are persuaded that they will survive death and live forever... they despise death and are willing to sacrifice their lives to their faith.

Lucian

The inversion of all human values. The human is put to death; and out of death comes life.

John C. Murray

There is no death. What seems so is transition. This life of mortal breath is but a suburb of the life elysian, whose portal we call death.

Adapted from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Death is frozen time. Time is molten death.

Franz Werfel

I have careful records of about 500 deathbeds, studied particularly with reference to the modes of death and the sensations of the dying... The great majority gave no sign one way or the other; like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.

William Osler

Centuries of systematic exploration of the riddle of death, with a view of overcoming death.

Boris Pasternak

The idea of the survival of the spirit after death in some form, whether clear or vague.

Anon.

....................so long as we are, death has not come, and when it has come we are not.

Epicurus

An illusion... What people call death is the intensification and reinvigoration of life.

Abraham Kook

Death is a lengthened prayer, a longer night, a larger end.

Adapted from Joaquin Miller

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still.

William Penn

What we call death is merely the bursting of a cell.

W. Winwood Reade

God made death so we'd know when to stop.

Steven Stiles

To put off a garment. For the body is about the soul as a garment; and after laying this aside for a short time by means of death, we shall resume it again with the more splendor.

Saint John Chrysostom

On the way to a great perhaps.

Anon.

Something that comes legitimately after death. So I'm not in any hurry for it.

Gower Champion

Death seems in the word - farewell.

Thomas Campbell

Fellowship is Heaven, and lack of fellowship is Hell; fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death.

William Morris

The brilliant triumph of the soul over the flesh ... over fear: fear of poverty, of suffering, of calumny, of sickness, of isolation, and of death.

Henry F. Amiel

After the royal throne comes death; after the dunghill comes the Kingdom of Heaven.

Saint John Chrysostom

Life after death in a better world where friends and dear ones shall meet again.

Anon.

When the silence of death will descend upon our planet.

E. I. Watkin

When the saints and sinners
Shall be parted right and left.

Anon.

Enslaved, illogical, elate,
He greets the embarrassed Gods, nor fears
To shake the iron hand of fate
Or match with destiny for beers.

Rudyard Kipling

A destiny which makes us brothers.

Edwin Markham

The word used for religion in Buddhism is brahma-cariya which may be translated as "the ideal life" - any way of life which anyone may consider to be the ideal as a consequence of his holding a certain set of beliefs about the nature and destiny of man in the universe.

G. P. Malalasekera and K. N. Jayatilleke

Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Men heap together the mistakes of their lives, and create a monster which they call Destiny.

John O. Hobbes

In all ages the drama... through its portrayal of the acting and suffering spirit of man, has been more closely allied than any other art to his deeper thoughts concerning his nature and destiny.

Ludwig Lewisohn

We are thought. Thought leads us. Therefore, the secret of our destiny lies here: in regulating our thoughts.

Antonin Sertillanges

The conception of the atom stems from the concepts of subject and substance: there has to be "something" to account for any action. The atom is the last descendant of the concept of the soul.

Friedrich W. Nietzsche

When the soul shall emerge from its sheath.

Marcus Aurelius

(That which) restores man to the state he was in before he was born; neither soul nor body has any feeling more.

Pliny

The desire of the soul, Heaven.

William Sharp

The theory that puts men with an immortal soul in the same circle with the wolf, the hyena, and the skunk.

Adapted from William Jennings Bryan

Chapter Thirteen

Contents