LONGECITY

Charles sounds the trumpet for people to come together to nourish each other, and to join in the greatest adventure of all time -- the ending of poverty, hunger, sickness, aging and death.

There are far worse things awaiting man than death.

"My world isn't given to angels--it's given to flesh, bone and blood human beings."

It is absurd that we are born, it is absurd that we die.
Jean Paul Sarte

All I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I have always found.
Samuel Beckett

Every day is a good day to be born; every day is a good day to die.
Pope John XXIII

St. Augustine in his Soliloquia asks himself the question: "When you have learned that you are immortal, will that be enough for you?" To which he himself gives the remarkable answer: "It will be something great; but it is too little for me."

"Of all human evils, death is the worst", it is "the most extreme of all human suffering", by it man is robbed of what is most lovable: life and being."

Death is not a netral event in nature, and certainly not a liberation of the soul from the imprisonment of the body, but the violent ending of a living unity, the destruction of the real man.

What the nature of this continuance will be, and how the mode of existence of the "departed soul," may be conceived, concerning these matters there is no substantiated human knowledge. And one can almost recognize the great minds by their abstaining from the claim to any such knowledge. We recognize them by their silence. Not only in Plato, but also in Thomas Aquinas, we find no speculations on what happens to man on the other side of death.

When the world and I vanish from one another, the world ends too!

If we find immortality, it will take forever to test it.

Longevity is only desirable if it increases the duration of youth, and not that of old age. The lengthening of the senescent period would be a calamity.

The greatest desire of men is for eternal youth.

Voices preaching false consolation will not help us, no matter how skillfully and soothingly they arrange nothingness. Alan Watts

This may be appraised as fine writing, and even a valid perception of man’s place in nature (so far), but it serves also to pretty up and glamorize death, and therefore, in the context of humanity’s long battle, to weaken and tranquilize our rebellion.

From the immortalist point of view, whoever teaches us to accept or, worse, embrace death in this world can-not be the last word in saints. A new kind of sainthood calls to us.

The attack on death has not been organized properly, for the simple reason that we have not dared announce it as an over-all objective. Still unconsciously afraid of antagonizing the gods (in this regard, the medical profession being as superstitious as the rest of us), we cannot bear to “speak the word”, let the hubris out, that we have a secret intent to do away with death entirely. Having no word, we have no program.

100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased.
- C.S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory"

If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture - that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.

- Edward Abbey

The trouble with quotes about death is that 99.999 percent of them are made by people who are still alive.

- Joshua Bruns

Now, my good man, this is no time for making enemies.

- Voltaire On His Deathbed In Response To A Priest Asking That He Renounce Satan

There will always be death and taxes; however, death doesn't get worse every year.

Born Free. . . . .Taxed to Death

I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
-- Mark Twain

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
-- Clarence Darrow

Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them.
-- Ed Howe

If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up.

I cannot accept the way in which we fix the duration of our life.
Edited by thefirstimmortal, 24 August 2008 - 08:44 AM.

Death and taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them.
-- Margaret Mitchell