Isaac Asimov Quotes

Art is longer than life.

A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Art is man's distinctly human way of fighting death.

On the basis of biological, sociological, and historical knowledge, we should recognize that the individual self is subject to death or decay, but the sum total of individual achievement, for better or worse, lives on in the immortality of The Larger.

Things you create with your mind are always part of your postmortal life, whether they seem real or not.

A diary is a way of hedging one’s bets against death.

What’s written remains, though a writer is buried beneath the ground.

If you're rich, you can leave a library, a building, or a hospital wing. But writing leaves behind a visceral sense of what it was like to be alive on the planet in a particular time. Writing tells us what it meant for someone to be human.

I think all creative people are operating from the fear that, of the best of what they did, will anybody remember it? Will anybody tell stories about them? Will anybody keep those pictures on the mantle long after they are gone? It's why people write stories. It's peoples' grave markers.

Art is the closest you can get to immortality, though it's a poor substitute - you're working for people not yet born - and people want it because it is brilliant. It ends up in museums anyway; the rich have to give it back to the people, it's their only option. There are no pockets in a shroud.

The noblest works and foundations have proceeded from childless men, which have sought to express the images of their minds where those of their bodies have failed.

One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breath, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives - transitoriness and oblivion.

Creativity is a yearning for immortality

Where are Shakespeare's imagination, Bacon's learning, Galileo's dream? Where is the sweet fancy of Sidney, the airy spirit of Fletcher, and Milton's thought severe? Methinks such things should not die and dissipate, when a hair can live for centuries, and a brick of Egypt will last three thousand years. I am content to believe that the mind of man survives, somehow or other, his clay.

The reasons that drive me to write are many and the most important are the most secret, I think. Perhaps most of all this: to put something out of death's reach.

As long as my ballets are danced, I will live.

The great and good do no die even in this world. Embalmed in books, their spirits walk abroad. The book is a living voice. It is an intellect to which one still listens.

Poems in a way are spells against death. They are milestones, to see where you were then from where you are now.

We can die by it, if not live by love, And if unfit for tombs and hearse Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; And if no peace of chronicle we prove, We'll build in sonnet pretty rooms; As well a well wrought urne becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs.

I don't buy art in order to leave a mark or to be remembered; clutching at immortality is of zero interest to anyone sane.

People perish. Books are immortal.

The only way to kill death is through photography.

People die, but books never die.