68 Uplifting Afterlife Quotes

The concept of the afterlife holds a significant place in cultures and religions around the world, offering a sense of hope, solace, and continuity beyond our earthly existence. Whether you're seeking comfort after the loss of a loved one or simply exploring the mysteries of what lies beyond, uplifting afterlife quotes can provide profound insights and encouragement. In this collection, we've gathered 68 thought-provoking and spirit-lifting quotes that illuminate the promise of life after death, inviting reflection, peace, and a renewed appreciation for the connections that transcend time and space. Join us as we delve into these inspiring words that celebrate the enduring journey of the soul.

1. “Fools that will laugh on earth, most weep in hell.” - Christopher Marlowe

2. “Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.” - Jim Carroll

3. “When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, 'I used everything you gave me.” - Erma Bombeck

4. “Seeing death as the end of life is like seeing the horizon as the end of the ocean.” - David Searls

5. “If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.” - Will Rogers

6. “The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her culture. At the beginning of the journey to the next world, one's education and culture can either provide the greatest assistance, or else act as the greatest burden, to the person who has just died.” - Plato

7. “Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.” - Kurt Vonnegut

8. “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” - Walt Whitman

9. “I don't like Paradise,As they probably don't have obsessions there.” - Alda Merini

10. “You are dead- what am I speaking to?” - Philip Pullman

11. “Time," the Captain said, "is not what you think." He sat down next to Eddie. "Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning.” - Mitch Albom

12. “There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.” - colum mccann

13. “Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians-- with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds-- project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.” - Bruce Chatwin

14. “I was asking if unwinding kills you, or if it leaves you alive somehow. C'mon—it's not like we haven't thought about it." (...)What do you think, Connor?" asks Hayden. "What hap­pens to your soul when you get unwound?"Who says I even got one?"For the sake of argument, let's say you do."Who says I want an argument?” - Neal Shusterman

15. “Tell them stories.” - Philip Pullman

16. “There is no conclusive evidence of life after death, but there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know, so why fret about it?” - Robert A. Heinlein

17. “But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.” - C.S. Lewis

18. “Afterlife exist in the unidentified substances.” - Toba Beta

19. “There wasn't a lot of bullshit in my heaven.” - Alice Sebold

20. “Here's my question: What age are you when you're in Heaven?” - Jodi Picoult

21. “But there’s a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe’a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, ‘I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.” - John Green

22. “Nor dread nor hope attendA dying animal;A man awaits his endDreading and hoping all.” - William Butler Yeats

23. “All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.” - David M. Eagleman

24. “Hell is the impossibility of reason.” - Oliver Stone

25. “The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. (It's the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall.” - Christopher Hitchens

26. “I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.” - Isaac Asimov

27. “She's had a long life. Now she's going to the Lord." "Frankly it creeps me out a little when you say things like that," Simon said. "It shouldn't. If you don't like 'Lord,' pick another word. She's going home. She's going back to the party. Whatever you like." "I suppose you have some definite ideas about an afterlife." "Sure. We get reabsorbed into the earthly and celestial mechanism." "No heaven?" "That's heaven." "What about realms of glory? What about walking around in golden slippers?" "We abandon consciousness as if we were waking from a bad dream. We throw it off like clothes that never fit us right. It's an ecstatic release we're physically unable to apprehend while we're in our bodies. Orgasm is our best hint, but it's crude and minor by comparison.” - Michael Cunningham

28. “I went to him in the doorway and embraced him tightly. "Thank you," I whispered. "You've done so much for us, and we've done nothing for you.""Don't say that." Vic's hands patted my back. "You're my friends. Nothing else to it.” - Claudia Gray

29. “We can always hate that which we loved, and with a fire as great as our love once was.” - Claudia Gray

30. “If there's hell below, we're all gonna go.” - Curtis Mayfield

31. “The day after Paul Newman was dead, he was twice as dead.” - Maurice Sendak

32. “That's what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays” - Mitch Albom

33. “If I lie down on my bed I must be here,But if I lie down in my grave I may be elsewhere.” - Stevie Smith

34. “I make a joke of it, but... but I'm afraid of death." He straightened up and turned to look into Joseph's eyes. Joseph saw the fear there and was shocked by the intensity of it. "Are you afraid to die, Joseph?" Joseph considered for a moment, then shook his head. "I'm not afraid to now, but then I'm not dying now. When I come to that moment, I will probably be... what's the right word? Maybe frightened in a way that you're frightened when an experience lies before you you've never had. "No more than that?" "I hope not.” - Gilbert Morris

35. “When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful. . . . The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.” - Ann Druyan

36. “He Is Not DeadI cannot say, and I will not sayThat he is dead. He is just away.With a cheery smile, and a wave of the hand,He has wandered into an unknown landAnd left us dreaming how very fairIt needs must be, since he lingers there.And you—oh you, who the wildest yearnFor an old-time step, and the glad return,Think of him faring on, as dearIn the love of There as the love of Here.Think of him still as the same. I say,He is not dead—he is just away.” - James Whitcomb Riley

37. “The human mind is so limited it can only build an arbitrary heaven — and usually the physical comforts they endow it with are naively the kind that can be perceived as we humans perceive — nothing more. No: perhaps I will awake to find myself burning in hell. I think not. I think I will be snuffed out. Black is sleep; black is a fainting spell; and black is death, with no light, no waking.” - Sylvia Plath

38. “The dead are merely the countrymen of my future.” - Dean Koontz

39. “I leave the kitchen table to bathe, and to dress for church. If only my closet held on its shelves an array of faces I could wear rather than dresses, I would know which face to put on today. As for the dresses, I haven't a clue.” - Tim Cummings

40. “It’s easier for me to make sense of it that way than it is for me to face the other way—reality. And yet, those evil spirits that were unleashed—be they fake entities from a stupid carnival ride, or cruel malevolencies from dark spiritual chasms of our universe—have stayed with me all these years” - Tim Cummings

41. “Listen, we’ll come visit you. Okay? I’ll dress up as William Shakespeare, Lucent as Emily Dickinson, and beautiful ‘Ray’ as someone dashing and manly like Jules Verne or Ernest Hemingway...and we’ll write on your white-room walls. We’ll write you out of your supposed insanity. I love you, Micky Affias.-James (from "Descendants of the Eminent")” - Tim Cummings

42. “It must not be thought, however, that in pagan Ireland Fairyland was altogether conceived as a Hades or place of the dead. We have already seen that in some of its types and aspects it was inherently nothing of the sort; as when, for example, it came to be confused with the Land of the Gods. In all likelihood these separate paradises and deadlands of a nature so various were the result of the stratified beliefs of successive races dwelling in the same region. A conquering race would scarcely credit that its heroes would, after death, betake themselves to the deadland of the beaten and enslaved aborigines. The gods of vanquished races might be conceived as presiding over spheres of the dead for which their victors would have nothing but contempt, and which, because of that very contempt, might come to be conceived as hells or places of a debased and grovelling kind, pestiferous regions which only the spirits of despised "natives" or the undesirable might inhabit.” - Lewis Spence

43. “There's the tree with the branches that everyone sees, and then there's the upside-down root tree, growing the opposite way. So Earth is the branches, growing in opposing but perfect symmetry. The branches don't think much about the roots, and maybe the roots don't think much about the branches, but all the time, they're connected by the trunk, you know?” - Gabrielle Zevin

44. “Life ends with a snap of small bones, a head cracked from its stem, and a spirit unmoored...” - Sarah Kernochan

45. “No quality imparts apparent strength to its possessors more effectively than faith. From hospital beds to battlefields, it is the iron that strengthens a man to confront his destiny.” - Mike Corbett

46. “I am fashionably unimpressed with the material world. I am moved by the beauty of aspiration, and I hope that I can elevate myself to the standards I have imposed on others.” - Mike Corbett

47. “I have kept thee long in waiting, dear Romuald, and thou mayst well have thought that I had forgotten thee. But I have come from a long distance and from a place from which no one has ever before returned; there is neither moon nor sun in the country from which I come; there is naught but space and shadow; neither road nor path; no ground for the foot, no air for the wing; and yet here I am, for love is stronger than death, and it will end by vanquishing it. Ah! what gloomy faces and what terrible things I have seen in my journeying! What a world of trouble my soul, returned to this earth by the power of my will, has had in finding its body and reinstating itself therein! What mighty efforts I had to put forth before I could raise the stone with which they had covered me! See! the palms of my poor hands are all blistered from it. Kiss them to make them well, dear love!” - Théophile Gautier

48. “...he fed his insides before they fed on him.” - Michael L. Martin Jr.

49. “No more is your master a god, Nobility, but he wants offerings from all. When Black God claims us, who will be punished for giving worship and power to a false god? The prince? Or Banjiku?” - Tamora Pierce

50. “Human knowledge hasn't been complete enough to understand the afterlife if it hasn't been through the valley of death.” - Toba Beta

51. “Actually, the substitution of the reality-principle for the pleasure-principle denotes no dethronement of the pleasure-principle, but only a safeguarding of it. A momentary pleasure, uncertain in its results, is given up, but only in order to gain in the new way an assured pleasure coming later. But the end psychic impression made by this substitution has been so powerful that it is mirrored in a special religious myth. The doctrine of reward in a future life for the—voluntary or enforced—renunciation of earthly lusts is nothing but a mythical projection of this revolution in the mind. In logical pursuit of this prototype, religions have been able to effect the absolute renunciation of pleasure in this life by means of the promise of compensation in a future life; they have not, however, achieved a conquest of the pleasure-principle this way. It is science which comes nearest to succeeding in this conquest; science, however, also offers intellectual pleasure during its work and promises practical gain at the end.” - Sigmund Freud

52. “I am very much out of my element here. There are moments, listening to the conversations going on around me, when I feel I am going to lose my mind. Earlier today, I heard someone say the words, "I felt at one with the divine source of creation." Mary Roach on a conducted tour of Hades. I had to fight the urge to push back my chair and start screaming: STAND BACK! ALL OF YOU! I'VE GOT AN ARTHUR FINDLAY BOX CUTTER! Instead, I quietly excused myself and went to the bar, to commune with spirits I know how to relate to.” - Mary Roach

53. “In life one of Midnight’s favourite movies had been It’s a Wonderful Life, a touching story where a man called George Bailey is shown how poor the world would have been if he’d never existed, but now the young ghost of Midnight Merlot was sat imagining himself not as the kind hero of his own narrative, but, - but as the anti-George.” - Tom Conrad

54. “It's an insidious idea, this notion that there is life after death. The promise of a reward in the afterlife has been used as an excuse to deny help to the poor, helpless and oppressed; to explain away human misery rather than deal with it. It is an idea that is used to encourage young men and women to kill themselves, and others, so that they can become martyrs. It allows victims of injustice to be told not to worry because justice will be done in the afterlife. It depresses me to think that so many people on the planet live their lives with this notion. Can we truly fulfill our potential as a species as long as we hold on to, and encourage, the perpetuation of the lie of life after death?” - Alom Shaha

55. “We had enough quite enough snobbery in this world without exporting it to the hereafter.” - Rick Riordan

56. “Since both the departed saints and we ourselves are in Christ, we share with them in the 'communion of saints.' They are still our brothers and sisters in Christ. When we celebrate the Eucharist they are there with us, along with the angels and archangels. Why then should we not pray for and with them? The reason the Reformers and their successors did their best to outlaw praying for the dead was because that had been so bound up with the notion of purgatory and the need to get people out of it as soon as possible. Once we rule out purgatory, I see no reason why we should not pray for and with the dead and every reason why we should - not that they will get out of purgatory but that they will be refreshed and filled with God's joy and peace. Love passes into prayer; we still love them; why not hold them, in that love, before God?” - N.T. Wright

57. “The Angel of Death took the woman's frail hand. "Don't be afraid." she said. "Life is your past. Death, on the other hand, is your soul preparing for a new beginning. A brand new adventure, if you like." An excerpt from Paradox - Equilibrium. Book 4 in the Paradox series (release date 2013)” - Patti Roberts

58. “And what if there are only spiders there, or something of that sort” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

59. “Říká se, že příběhy o strašidlech jsou optimistické, protože věří v posmrtný život.” - Neil Gaiman

60. “The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.” - St. Bede

61. “If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.” - Christopher Hitchens

62. “So, is there an afterlife, and if so, what will it be like? I don't have a clue. But I am confident that the one who has buoyed us up in life will also buoy us up through death. We die into God. What more that means, I do not know. But that is all I need to know.” - Marcus J. Borg

63. “I believe humans have souls, and I believe in the conservation of souls.” - John Green

64. “I don't know what happens after we die. It doesn't seem to me like there can be much past this. But I suppose I can conceive that what we make and do can last beyond us. Maybe in a different place, on another plane.” - Ally Condie

65. “You hear stories like that all your life and think: cool, a ghost bus. But now we have to look at this stuff analytically... a ghost bus?! The “ghost” of a motor vehicle? A public conveyance, presumably, which didn't head towards the light, move on to join the choir invisible in... bus heaven, the great terminus in the sky, where all good buses go when they... I don't know, break down, but instead is doomed to … drive eternally the streets of Earth! How can there be a ghost bus?!” - Paul Cornell

66. “I don't feel so sad when somebody dies, Julio, because they fly away to explore the stars and planets. When it's our turn we join them in exploring the universe.” - Gilbert Hernández

67. “I suppose that now would be the time to ask for forgiveness for all the things I've done, but I'm sure my list would never be complete. I also don't believe that whatever comes after life depends on my correctly reciting a list of my transgressions...I don't believe that what comes after depends on anything I do at all.” - Veronica Roth

68. “There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.” - Iris Murdoch