“All men's souls are immortal, but the souls of the righteous are immortal and divine.”
“I believe in the immortality of the soul because I have within me immortal longings.”
Source: To Love This Life: Quotations By Helen Keller
“The second childhood of a saint is the early infancy of a happy immortality, as we believe.”
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 438.
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), III : The Hunger of Immortality
Context: I am dreaming...? Let me dream, if this dream is my life. Do not awaken me from it. I believe in the immortal origin of this yearning for immortality, which is the very substance of my soul. But do I really believe in it...? And wherefore do you want to be immortal? you ask me, wherefore? Frankly, I do not understand the question, for it is to ask the reason of the reason, the end of the end, the principle of the principle.
Quoted by Will Durant in On the Meaning of Life http://books.google.com/books?id=XH5HAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Either+the+soul+is+immortal+and+we+shall+not+die+or+it+perishes+with+the+flesh+and+we+shall+not+know+that+we+are+dead+Live+then+as+if+you+were+eternal%22&pg=PA53#v=onepage (1932)
Context: What shall we know of our death? Either the soul is immortal and we shall not die, or it perishes with the flesh and we shall not know that we are dead. Live, then, as if you were eternal, and do not believe that your life has changed merely because it seems proved that the Earth is empty. You do not live in the Earth, you live in yourself.
"Kevin Malone", New Terrors (1980), ed. Ramsey Campbell, Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Endangered Species (1989), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009)
Fiction
