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Dying is like getting out of a car. You leave a shell behind, but you're the same person as ever.
...to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on Heaven is to create hell. In their desperate longing to transcend the disorderliness, friction, and unpredictability that pesters life; in their desire for a fresh start in a tidy habitat, germ-free and secured by angels, religious multitudes are gambling the only life they may ever have on a dark horse in a race that has no finish line.
Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.
My poor friend, we don't know what to do with this short life, and do you want another which shall be eternal!
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another!
Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep -- that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live.
What is our life but a succession of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death.
It must be so -- Plato, thou reasonest well!
Elsewhence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?
Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror,
Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul
Back on herself, and startles at destruction?
'Tis the divinity that stirs within us;
'Tis heaven itself, that points out a hereafter,
And intimates eternity to man.
Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought!
Like the caterpillar, man crawls for a while on the earth; he is then received by it, in the wooden chrysalis, the coffin, where he rests throughout the winter; in the spring he breaks through the shell and rises out of the cold earth, with new and unsullied beauty.