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"What's After This?": 30 Quotes on the Afterlife

See what well-known people have said about death - and life.

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me.” - Erma Bombeck

Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead. - Kurt Vonnegut

In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory. - J.R.R. Tolkien

If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went. - Will Rogers

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library. - J.K. Rowling

The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves. - Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

That's what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays. - Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it. - Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

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

The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her culture. At the beginning of the journey to the next world, one's education and culture can either provide the greatest assistance, or else act as the greatest burden, to the person who has just died. - Plato, The Republic

Of course you don't die. Nobody dies. Death doesn't exist. You only reach a new level of vision, a new realm of consciousness, a new unknown world. - Henry Miller

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity. - Seneca

I believe that when death closes our eyes we shall awaken to a light, of which our sunlight is but the shadow. - Arthur Schopenhauer

Death - the last sleep? No, it is the final awakening. - Walter Scott

Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because dawn has come. - Rabindranath Tagore

When you are born, you cry, and the world rejoices. When you die, you rejoice, and the world cries. - Buddhist saying

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure. - J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Die happily and look forward to taking up a new and better form. Like the sun, only when you set in the west can you rise in the east. - Jelaluddin Rumi

No one knows whether death may not even turn out to be the greatest blessings of human beings. And yet people fear it as if they knew for certain it is the greatest evil. - Socrates

Life is eternal; and love is immortal; and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight. - R.W. Raymond

What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it. The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning. - Carl Jung

Death is only a level crossing from one life to another, from life in its beginnings to life in full achievements. From this incomplete life to that transformed one. - Raoul Plus

Death is the greatest illusion of all. - Osho Rajneesh

Death ends a life, not a relationship. - Jack Lemmon

Perhaps they are not stars, but rather openings in heaven where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy. - Eskimo Saying

The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there may be no afterlife -- a depressing thought, particularly for those who have bothered to shave. Also, there is the fear that there is an afterlife but no one will know where it's being held. - Woody Allen

I look upon death to be as necessary to the constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning. - Benjamin Franklin

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting. And cometh from afar. - William Wordsworth

Seeing death as the end of life is like seeing the horizon as the end of the ocean. - David Searls

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