Russell Shorto Quotes

No man can pass into eternity, for he is already in it.

When Time is spent, Eternity begins.

The religious man, the mystic, tries to explore the mystery of death. In exploring the mystery of death, he inevitably comes to know what life is, what love is. Those are not his goals. His goal is to penetrate death, because there seems to be nothing more mysterious than death. Love has some mystery because of death, and life also has some mystery because of death.

If everything that ever lived is dead, and everything alive is gonna die...where does the sacred part come in?

I think it is impossible for human minds to think of Death as a final, irrevocable end to life.

In the ordinary, everyday understandings of the words involved, to say that someone survived death is to contradict yourself; while to assert that all of us live forever is to assert a manifest falsehood, the flat contrary of a universally known truth: namely, the truth that all human beings are mortal. For when, after some disaster, the 'dead' and the 'survivors' have both been listed, what logical space remains for a third category?

I do not think seventy years is the time of a man or woman, Nor that seventy millions of years is the time of a man or woman, Nor that years will ever stop the existence of me, or any one else.

Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves And Immortality. We slowly drove, he knew no haste, And I had put away My labour, and my leisure too, For his civility. We passed the school where children played, Their lessons scarcely done; We passed the fields of gazing grain, We passed the setting sun. We paused before a house that seemed A swelling of the ground; The roof was scarcely visible, The cornice but a mound. Since then 'tis centuries; but each Feels shorter than the day I first surmised the horses' heads Were toward eternity.

Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long, nor short, to things that are no more.

At most, you will live a hundred years on earth, but you will spend forever in eternity.

Does not Eternity appear dreadful to you. I often get to thinking of it and it seems so dark to me that I almost wish there was no Eternity. To think that we must forever live and never cease to be. It seems as if Death would be a relief to so endless a state of existence.

If you can love death you become deathless; if you can understand non-being then your being becomes the very ground of being-hood, the very ground of God. If you can love non-being then nothing can destroy you, you have transcended time and space. Then you have become one with the total, and this is what holiness is - to become whole is to be holy.

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

It is impossible to experience one's death objectively and still carry a tune.

I am through with this body, and what becomes of it will make no difference with me in the future.

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.

To me death is not a fearful thing. It's living that's cursed.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.

Nothing is more dreadful in life than the profound thought that death may only greet you with eternal nothingness.

The elimination of the fear of death transforms the individual's way of being in the world.

Eternity is not something that begins after you're dead. It is going on all the time. We are in it now.

I will burn, but this is a mere event. We shall continue our discussion in eternity.

Reason is immortal, all else mortal.