Tao Te Ching
Immortality
On one hand, we fear death and hope for immortality. On the other, we have a sense that only other people will die; or, if we accept our own demise, it's usually too far off in the future to worry about. On the desire for immortality side, it seems always only based on a confused and distorted sense of self. In their search for this unexamined quality, powerful rulers build monuments, pyramids, libraries. Politicians, scientists, artists, business people look for immortality in legacies and fame. The wise throughout history have recognized the inherent immortality of our true selves, of our collective consciousness, of mind's authentic nature.
Quotes (90)
“Of all the world’s wonders which is the most wonderful? That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believe that he himself will die.”
“When gods alike and mortals rose to birth,
A golden race th' immortals for'd on earth
Of many-languaged men: they lived of old
When Saturn reign'd in heaven, an age of gold.”
“We refer to it as life and death, but there is no life or death.”
“Genuineness is the path of immortality, thoughtlessness the path of death.”
“How could what is real end? How could it have been created? For if it came into being, it would have had to come from nothing. But nothing is not. Therefore there is no birth or death.”
“Mortals are immortals, and immortals are mortals, the one living the other's death and dying the other's life.”
“Seek not, my soul, the life of the immortals; but enjoy to the full the resources that are within thy reach.”
“Who knoweth if to die be but to live, and that called life by mortals be but death?”
“Of all the things that wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life, by far the most important is friendship... the chief concerns of the right-minded person are wisdom and friendship of which the former is a mortal benefit, the latter an immortal one.”
“Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist”
“My poem is done, I laugh and my delight is vaster than the sea.
Oh deathless poetry! The songs of Chu-ping are ever glorious as the sun and moon.
While the palaces and towers of the Chu kings have vanished from the hills.”
“In comparison with Heaven and Earth, man is like a mayfly. But compared to the Great Meaning, Heaven and Earth, too, are like a bubble and a shadow. Only the primordial spirit and the true essence overcome time and space.”
“I shall not die, these seeds I've sown will save
My name and reputation from the grave,
And men of sense and wisdom will proclaim,
When I have gone, my praises and my fame.”
“There is perfect harmony in realizing the nature of every experience but only with the vision of ultimate reality can you drink the elixir of immortality and be truly alive.”
“Plan for this world as if you expect to live forever; but plan for the hereafter as if you expect to die tomorrow.”
“Those who possess the Way are like children. They come of age without growing old.”
“Though man is not an immortal animal, like the universe, he is nonetheless reasonable, and with his intelligence, his imagination and his soul, he can act upon and transform the whole world.”
“As long as art lives, never shall I accept that men are truly dead.”
“We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life.”
“I will never be an old man. To me old age is always 15 years older than I am.”
“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so… And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”
“We never came into being and we never go out of being. All of these coming and goings are just pulses in the pattern. ”
“Whatever the poets pretend, it is plain they give immortality to none but themselves; it is Homer and Virgil we reverence and admire, not Achilles or Aeneas. With historians it is quite the contrary; our thoughts are taken up with the actions, persons, and events we read, and we little regard the authors.”
“The divine Anaxagoras who had altars erected to him for teaching men that the sun was bigger than the Peloponnessus, that snow was black, that the sky was of stone, affirmed that the soul sas an aerial spirit, though immortal.”
“The divine Plato, master of the divine Aristotle, and the divine Socrates, master of the divine Plato, said that the soul was at the same time corporeal and eternal.”
“As for the exterior religion of buddhism, the principal point of its doctrine is that the souls of men and of animals are immortal; that they are originally of the same substanace, and they they differ only according to the different bodies they animate”
“Rest not - life is sweeping by
Go and dare before you die.
Something mighty and sublime,
leave behind to conquer time.”
“It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organized dust—ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the spark goes out, which kept it together. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable”
“When a noble life welcomes old age, it is not the decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality… imagination pictures beyond the horizon an asylum of hope—a native land of love; and nature seems silently to repeat that man is immortal.”
“Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge - it is as immortal as the heart of man.”
“Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows like harmony in music; there is a dark inscrutable workmanship that reconciles discordant elements, makes them cling together In one society.”
“Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal.”
“To desire immortality is to desire the perpetuation of a great mistake.”
“The more clearly you become conscious of the frailty, vanity, and dream-like quality of all things, the more clearly will you also become conscious of the eternity of your own inner being”
“In its explanation of the origin of the world, Judaism is inferior to any other form of religious doctrine professed by a civilized nation, it is the only one which presents no trace whatever of any belief in the immortality of the soul.”
“Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses: the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in these immortal creations.”
“I feared, loved, suffered did, and died…
If I have been extinguished, yet there arise
A thousand beacons from the spark I bore
The great, the unforgotten: they who wore
Signs of thought’s empire over thought; their lore”
“He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness... A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins”
“I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.”
“by combining science with religion, the existence of God and immortality of man's spirit may be demonstrated.”
“The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed; and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”
“The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.”
“[belief in] the immortality of the soul... was immoral... it would distract men's minds from the perfecting of this world's economy, and was an impatient cutting of the Gordian knot of life's problems”
“The greatest use of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”
“If you want to realize immortality you must realize the deathless nature of your mind.”
“No one wins his greatest fame in that to which he has given most of his time; it's the side issue, the thing he does for recreation, his heart's play-spell that gives him immortality.”
“In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the collective creation—the truth of immortality.”
“No matter what I did, I don't regret it... I did this, that, and the other thing in my life, yet I did very little, Men like me should live a thousand years. Good night!”
“Buddha called men to self-forgetfulness five hundred years before Christ. In some ways he was near to us and our needs. Buddha was more lucid upon our individual importance in service than Christ, and less ambiguous upon the question of personal immortality... You see clearly a man, simple, devout, lonely, battling for light, a vivid human personality, not a myth.”
“Michelangelo discovered that the essence of his genius was drawn toward sculpture with an irresistible force… if painting has immortalized him, it is in spite of himself. He never wished to be considered as anything but a sculptor.”
“I came to the Greeks early and I found answers in them. Greece's great men let all their acts turn on the immortality of the soul. We don't really act as if we believed in the soul's immortality and that's why we are where we are today.”
“[Wollstonecraft's] writing, arguments, and experiments in living are immortal: she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.”
“Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face... eternity gazing at itself in a mirror... you are eternity and you are the mirror.”
“man's lofty toil transgresses the inhuman laws of eternity. Thus our life and our endeavors acquire a tragic, heroic intensity. We have but a single moment at our disposal. Let us transform that moment into eternity. No other form of immortality exists.”
“My soul suddenly longed to transcend its destiny, breathe free air, and become a bird—for a flash only, as long as it could endure. But that was enough; this flash was eternity. That is the meaning of eternity.”
“For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.”
“I am quite content with mortality; I should be appalled at the thought of living forever, in whatever paradise... We must make room for our children.”
“Life is that which can hold a purpose for three thousand years and never yield. The individual fails, but life succeeds. The individual is foolish, but life holds in its blood and seed the wisdom of generations. The individual dies, but life, tireless and undiscourageble, goes on, wondering, longing, planning, trying, mounting, longing.”
“To run true to type is the extinction of a man, his condemnation to death. If he cannot be assigned to a category... half of what is needed is there. He is free from himself, he has acquired an atom of immortality.”
“not based on the overcoming of time, but on the identification with the creative power of every moment… through participation in consciousness, the individual may become an organic part of a greater whole, and thus achieve immortality within that whole”
“I believe in the immortality of works, of the influence of all we do and all we say... the immortality of the race... Franklin is immortal today in the lightening rod and the stove he produced, in the American postal service, the American Philosophical Society, even in the very Republic of the United States itself. Thomas Edison lives for me every time I turn on a switch or watch a movie... Luther Burbank every time I eat a Burbank pear. The Wright Brothers live every time an airplane flies. Is this not enough, O discontented Man?”
“It is our higher aspirations that make us immortal—not the permanence of an immutable separate soul, whose very sameness would exclude us from life and growth and from the infinite adventure of the spirit and condemn us forever to the prison of our own limitations.”
“We are mortal as long as we fear death, but we become immortal as soon as we do not identify ourselves with the confines of our present personality and yield to the eternal rhythm of the universe in which we live.”
“Two ideas are psychologically deep-rooted in man: self-protection and self-preservation. For self-protection man has created God, on whom he depends for his own protection, safety and security, just as a child depends on its parent. For self-preservation man has conceived the idea of an immortal Soul or Atman, which will live eternally. In his ignorance, weakness, fear, and desire, man needs these two things to console himself. Hence he clings to them deeply and fanatically.”
“You don't get old from age, you get old from inactivity, from not believing in something.”
“You don't try. That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more.”
“The universe will never be extinguished because just when the darkness seems to have smothered all, the new seeds of light are reborn in the very depths. That is the Way. When the seed falls, it falls into the earth, into the soil. And beneath, out of sight, it comes to life.”
“Life is short. Art, or something not life, is long, stretching out endless, like a concrete worm. Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over or across it.”
“Lao Tzu is not saying that immortality or even longevity is desirable. The religion called Taoism has spent much imagination on ways to prolong life interminably or gain immortality… but the Lao Tzu who wrote this had no truck with such notions.”
“What is eternal is forever young, never grows old…The Way never fails. We are waves. It is the sea.”
“It was not merely the souls of the Egyptian pharaohs that passed on into the afterlife but their complete offices and roles, along with all the tangible reminders of their earthly triumphs--including servants put to death.”
“Immortality is the state of forgetting that we have forgotten... serious and in no way playful... a state of unrelieved theatricality... the supreme example of the contradictoriness of finite play. It is a life one cannot live.”
“I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.”
“Grandson of the first Han emperor, [Huainanzi] was a devoted Daoist. Although his search for the elixir of immortality was prematurely interrupted when he was accused of plotting to seize the throne and was forced to commit suicide.”
“The Iliad of Homer... one of the most deeply religious books ever composed... is an enduring statement of the living tradition of polytheism. Immortal and powerful, the gods of Homer are nonetheless strikingly human in their greed, arrogance, jealously, and promiscuity. However, far from being simplistic or childish, the gods of Homer are testimony to a profound effort to understand the meaning of life.”
“Our unexamined sense of immortality teams up with the 8 mundane concerns to shape a working hypothesis that death is so far in the future that it is functionally irrelevant.”
“The only potentially immortal organic entity is a gene — or, strictly speaking, the pattern of information encoded in the gene, since the physical gene itself will pass away after conveying the pattern through replication”
“In spite of your fears, no matter what happens to your physical body, your true nature is essentially indestructible.”
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