William Jennings Bryan Quotes

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 organised 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 - and life is more than a dream.

Death is the final stage of growth in this life. There is no total death. Only the body dies. The self or the spirit, or whatever you may wish to label it, is eternal. You may interpret this in any way that makes you comfortable.

The soul never dies and the body is never really alive.

The spirit of man, which God inspired, cannot together perish with this corporeal clod.

All of us have mortal bodies, composed of perishable matter, but the soul lives forever: it is a portion of the Deity housed in our bodies

We have no evidence whatsoever that the soul perishes with the body.

To say it again, eternal life is less about a kind of time that starts when we die, and more about a quality and vitality of life now in connection to God. Eternal life doesn't start when we die; it starts now. It's not about a life that begins at death; it's about experiencing the kind of life now that can endure and survive even death.

(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.

If that vital spark that we find in a grain of wheat can pass unchanged through countless deaths and resurrections, will the spirit of man be unable to pass from this body to another?

The doctrine of immortality rests upon human affection. We love; therefore, we wish to live.

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

I expect my immortality will last about six seconds after my funeral.

I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.

It isn't easy to live after death. It takes a lifetime.

We are spirits. That bodies should be lent us while they afford us pleasure, assist us in acquiring knowledge or in doing good to our fellow-creatures, is a kind of benevolent act of God. When they become unfit for these purposes and afford us pain instead of pleasure, instead of an aid become an encumbrance and answer none of these intentions for which they were given, it is equally kind and benevolent that a way is provided by which we get rid of them. Death is that way.

Asked whether or not he believed in an afterlife, Thoreau quipped, "One world at a time."

There is no death-the thing that we call death Is but another, sadder name for life, Which is itself an insufficient name, Faint recognition of that unknown life- That Power whose shadow is the Universe.

If I am mistaken in my opinion that the human soul is immortal, I willingly err; nor would I have this pleasant error extorted from me; and if, as some minute philosophers suppose, death should deprive me of my being, I need not fear the raillery of those pretended philosophers when they are no more.

I think, when we start dealing with heaven or hell issues, what we really need to gravitate toward is that man is an eternal spirit. And if you believe that he is an eternal spirit then all it does, it abandons the body.

The soul comes from without into the human body, as into a temporary abode, and it goes out of it anew it passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal." "It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again. Nothing is dead; men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals... and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some strange new disguise.

I am firmly convinced that there is life after death, not in a primitive sense but as the entry of my completely finite person into God's infinity, as a transition into another reality beyond the dimension of space and time that pure reason can neither affirm nor deny.

When you look at the basis for the immortality of the soul, you have these foundationless speculations and really, no intelligent reason for believing that there's life after death.

I believe ... that the soul of man is immortal and will be treated with justice in another life, respecting its conduct in this.

I firmly believe that when you die you will enter immediately into another life. They who have gone before us are alive in one form of life and we in another.