Donald Hall Quotes

The first requisite for immortality is death.

Let no one weep for me, or celebrate my funeral with mourning; for I still live, as I pass to and fro through the mouths of men.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

Everyone dies, and I am not, you know, I don't believe in the Homeric idea that, you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?

I shall not altogether die.

I shall not wholly die, and a great part of me will escape the grave.

Everybody loves you when you're six foot in the ground.

I've a great fancy to see my own funeral afore I die.

Should I perchance still feel after my death, I would no longer have any doubt, but I would most certainly give the lie to anyone asserting before me that I was dead.

It's funny the way most people love the dead. Once you are dead, you are made for life.

The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you.

If we can prove an afterlife, then we have less pressure to make our physical life last forever.

To be seen is the ambition of ghosts, and to be remembered is the ambition of the dead.

I shall not completely die.

Human beings, on the contrary, have a soul which lives forever, lives after the body has been turned to dust. It rises up through the clear, pure air beyond the glittering stars.

I have heard that death takes us away from ill things, not from good. I have heard that when we pronounce the name of man we pronounce the belief of immortality.

(Socrates) said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born.

Death is simply a break in our linear stream of consciousness.

I don't mind if my skull ends up on a shelf as long as it's got my name on it.

I've always been slightly preoccupied with death or whatever those kind of silly big questions people will tell you to not spend your time worrying about.

I suppose that every one of us hopes secretly for immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live forever in this world, whatever he may be doing, himself, in the next.

It's not whether you win or lose, it's how many people remember you when you die.

Most of us believe that we possess some aspect of eternity that will insure some kind of survival beyond death. The only problem with those strategies is they forget that only God is eternal. We are finite.

Corporeal death is not the whole story.

Since we have had a history, men have pursued an ideal of immortality.