Home > Topic > an afterlife
1 " I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths. "
― Alain de Botton , Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
2 " Through the darkest hours of the nightand through the dreamers realm I seek,Far beyond the starry skyand beyond galaxies I am free.Through the grimmest memoriesand past a seasons air I cannot breathe,Far beyond this mortal worldin an afterlife we shall meet. "
― Lee Argus
3 " People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to. "
― John Green , Looking for Alaska
4 " We obey people we don't trust, to buy things we don't need, to impress people we don't like, using money we don't have, for gratifications that don't last, killing animals we don't hate, for pleasures that don't satisfy, dreaming of a life we don't deserve, and praying for an afterlife that doesn't exist, we are a stupid species "
5 " We must give our children back their ability to see the divine; we must help them to return to their original innocence where they saw God everywhere they look. They saw the divine in the flowers and the insects of the world, they saw God in the animals and the clouds, and we have stolen that ability from them, give it back to them! Tell them they do not have to wait for an afterlife to experience the divine, because the divine is here with us, within each of us and all around us. Can’t you see? "
― Martin Suarez
6 " 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. "
― Dara Horn , The World to Come
7 " I stayed in bed for over an hour looked at things on my phone I felt slightly anxious about nothing particular I walked downstairs and poured coffee into a jar I asked a person on the internet if I should take drugs I took drugs before the person had time to respondI feel alienated by people who express concern about me without defining their concern in terms of a specific solution or goal I dont feel comforted by the idea of an afterlife I dont want to continue experiencing things after I dieI want someone to pull my hair because I like the idea of someone controlling my head without touching my headwhat is the difference between being an independent person and being a person who is accepting of loneliness? "
8 " The greatest admission a human can make is that perhaps he does not have the intelligence, the vision, the grasp to fully understand the universe, and that perhaps no human ever will. To put it all down to some omnipotent deity is a cop-out. Factor in fairy tales of an afterlife and it becomes a comforting cop-out. "
9 " The secret idea she was forming of an afterlife gave her the foothold she needed to endure the agonies to come, a newfound courage and optimism which found instant expression through SHOPPING. "
10 " People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the though of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believe in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to. "
11 " I'd rather believe in reincarnation than hell. The idea of an afterlife is much so more tolerable when returning is an option. "
― , Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots
12 " George was an atheist, and so am I. But how I long now for an afterlife - a world of light or of deep dazzling darkness, where he and the others we've lost reside, unscathed, forever accessible - to have tea with, to talk nonsense with, to reinvent the world with "
― Justin Spring , Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade
13 " Anyone who craves an afterlife has not lived their life to the fullest. "
14 " I think that's shameful, even if it's just a story, to propose an afterlife for evil... Any afterlife notion is a manipulation and a sop. It's shameful the way the unionists and the pagans both keep talking up hell for intimidation and the airy Other Land for reward. "
― Gregory Maguire
15 " In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience. "
― John Updike , Self-Consciousness
16 " The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there may be no afterlife - a depressing thought, particularly for those who bothered to shave. Also, there is the fear that there is an afterlife but no one will know where it's being held. On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily laying down. "
― Woody Allen , Without Feathers
17 " People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn’t bare the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn’t bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn’t even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to. "
18 " We know summer is the height of of being alive. We don't believe in God or the prospect of an afterlife mostly, so we know that we're only given eighty summers or so per lifetime, and each one has to be better then the last, has to encompass a trip to that arts center up at Bard, a seemingly mellow game of badminton over at some yahoo's Vermont cottage, and a cool, wet, slightly dangerous kayak trip down an unforgiving river. Otherwise, how would you know that you have lived your summertime best? What is you missed out on some morsel of shaded nirvana? "
19 " I do not believe in an afterlife although I am bringing a change of underwear. "
