#afterlife

I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions. ↗

— Karen Armstrong

#afterlife #am #conditions #ego #eternally

I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse. ↗

— Isaac Asimov

#believe #boredom #even #even worse #fearing

Creation groans, awaiting the revelation of the sons of God. It remembers, I think, in dreams, the wonders of the sinless, perfect world. You can hear it in the wild tinkle of the wind through the beech leaves, the splashing of water through cold, crystal streams, the beauty of a hind poised against the sky on a hilltop, and al through heartbreaking, beautiful things that surround us each day. They are memories, dear Indi, memories of long-lost days when God walked with man and all was well [...] But all these beauties we see are but dreams in the night, whispers of a hope to come beyond the end of this Age, that wonderful Other Thing. [...] God will not settle for imperfection, but He works His own ways in His own time. That is what we are living for, that is what stirs our sweet dreams each night, both us and the world, and that is what keeps us going through the dark: knowing that a morning is coming. And while we love the beauty of our world, we must remember that it is only a type, a shadow thing, very faintly resembling what is to come. ↗

— Jennifer Freitag

#beauty-in-literature #courage #life #purpose #age

Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought. ↗

— Tom Stoppard

#death #eternity #experience #life #death

Man is so muddled, so dependent on the things immediately before his eyes, that every day even the most submissive believer can be seen to risk the torments of the afterlife for the smallest pleasure. ↗

— Joseph de Maistre

#before #believer #day #dependent #even

I had to get rid of any idea of hell or any idea of the afterlife. That's what held me, kept me down. So now I just have nothing but contempt for the institution of the church. ↗

— Frank McCourt

#any #church #contempt #down #get

The young boys I speak with say to me: Why would I want to live in this world - where they rely on charity, dry pieces of bread and water, where they are subjected to harsh treatment, when they can be free and be the envy of their colleagues in the afterlife. They are only too eager to sign on the dotted line and join the ranks of the Taliban. ↗

— Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

#bread #charity #colleagues #dotted #dry

Sweet Evelyn, I think, I should have loved you better. Possessing perfect knowledge I hover above him as he hacks me to bits. I see his rough childhood. I see his mother doing something horrid to him with a broomstick. I see the hate in his heart and the people he had yet to kill before pneumonia gets him at eighty-three. I see the dead kid's mom unable to sleep, pounding her fists against her face in grief at the moment I was burying her son's hand. I see the pain I've caused. I see the man I could have been, and the man I was, and then everything is bright and new and keen with love and I sweep through Sam's body, trying to change him, trying so hard, and feeling only hate and hate, solid as stone. ↗

— George Saunders

#compassion #empathy #forgiveness #hatred #change

And here we see again that we do not decide our own lives. Dieneke, even if we won't see each other again on earth, we will never be sorry for what we did, that we took this stand. ↗

— Diet Eman

#no-regrets #surrender #unpredictability-of-life #diet

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. ↗

— Walt Whitman

#life-and-death #living #death