Robert G. Ingersoll Quotes

People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.

I'm simply a nonbeliever and have been forever. ... I'm interested in saying, 'Let us discuss the existential question. We are all going to die, that is the end of all consciousness. There is no afterlife. There is no God. Now what do we do.' That's the point where it starts getting interesting to me.

I guess that is what dying must be like; to be finished and to be able to look back at the struggles of life, and know that God was your constant companion.

Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: 'What shall we do and how shall we live?'

The most important philosophy I think is that even if it isn't true you must absolutely assume there is no afterlife.

Life belongs to man, but the meaning of life is beyond him.

If I just got up in the morning and had no place to go and was retired or something, I would be sitting there and be thinking, "Gee, what is the purpose of life? Why are we all finite? Why do we get old and die? Is there nothing out there? Why is it so tragic? Why do our loved ones perish? Why do we generate?" Who wants to think about that stuff?

Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question. Science has no answer to it.

It is a tragedy that most of us die before we have begun to live.

Man is perishing. That may be, and if it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate.

I cheerfully quit from life as if it were an inn, not a home; for Nature has given us a hostelry in which to sojourn, not to abide.

Leonard asks me if there's anything I need to know before he dies, I think about it for a minute, turn to him, say what's the meaning of life, Leonard? He laughs, says that's an easy one, my son, it's whatever you want it to be.

No one knows whether death may not be the greatest good that can happen to man.

Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.

Faith is a great thing, and really religious people would like us to believe that faith and knowing are the same thing, but I don't believe that myself. Because there are too many different ideas on the subject. What we know is this: When we die, one of two things happens. Either our souls and thoughts somehow survive the experience of dying or they don't. If they do, that opens up every possibility you could think of. If they don't, it's just blotto. The end.

It was like wondering how evil had come into the world or what happens to a person after he dies: an interesting philosophical exercise, but also curiously pointless, since evil and death happened, regardless of the why and the how and what-it-meant.

When you're dead, you don't breathe, you don't see, you don't feel, you don't love.

When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together.

To die is only to be as we were before we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea.

Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.

The answer to the nature of our existence is somewhere in the middle, and that, of course, is what we're looking for: how to see ourselves in a new picture of ourselves and understand the questions that humans have asked forever, "Who are we, how did we get here, where are we going, and what's the nature of this reality that we're in?"

How many caskets can we witness before we see it's hard to live this life without God, so we must ask forgiveness.

What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.

I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.

I finally did not understand if we are living to survive or we are living to die!