From Here to Eternity (1951)
Context: "A deathbed promise is the most sacred one there is," she hawked at him from the lungs that were almost, but not quite, filled up yet, "and I want you to make me this promise on my deathbed: Promise me you wont never hurt nobody unless its absolute a must, unless you jist have to do it."
"I promise you," he vowed to her, still waiting for the angels to appear. "Are you afraid?" he said.
"Give me your hand on it, boy. It is a deathbed promise, and you'll never break it."
"Yes maam," he said, giving her his hand, drawing it back quickly, afraid to touch the death he saw in her, unable to find anything beautiful or edifying or spiritually uplifting in this return to God. He watched a while longer for signs of immortality. No angels came, however, there was no earthquake, no cataclysm, and it was not until he had thought it over often this first death that he had had a part in that he discovered the single uplifting thing about it, that being the fact that in this last great period of fear her thought had been upon his future, rather than her own. He wondered often after that about his own death, how it would come, how it would feel, what it would be like to know that this breath, now, was the last one. It was hard to accept that he, who was the hub of this known universe, would cease to exist, but it was an inevitability and he did not shun it. He only hoped that he would meet it with the same magnificent indifference with which she who had been his mother met it. Because it was there, he felt, that the immortality he had not seen was hidden.
“If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It… prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intracacy?”
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)
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Carl Sagan 365
American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science ed… 1934–1996Related quotes
Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.78, p. 117
Religious-based Quotes
The Purpose of Life, p. 53
The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? (2002)
Source: The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948), Ch. 1, part 2: The Economy of Nature, p. 41.
"Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer."
Mais toute la nature nous crie qu'il existe; qu'il y a une intelligence suprême, un pouvoir immense, un ordre admirable, et tout nous instruit de notre dépendance.
Voltaire quoting himself in his Letter to Prince Frederick William of Prussia (28 November 1770), translated by S.G. Tallentyre, Voltaire in His Letters (1919)
Citas
“Hal: God is a gentleman. He prefers blondes.”
Loot (1965), Act II
Zeno, 72.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 7: The Stoics
“The conqueror is always a lover of peace; he would prefer to take over our country unopposed.”
Source: On War (1832), Book 6, Ch. 2
When he was offered a ministerial post in the Interim Government before independence and partition of the country, p. 211.
About Zakir Hussain, Quest for Truth (1999)