William Makepeace Thackeray Quotes

Maybe heaven entailed more than a soul residing in a single place, but instead having pieces of yourself spread among the hearts and memories of people you've touched.

Those who are gone, you have. Those who departed loving you, love you still; and you love them always. They are not really gone, those dear hearts and true; they are only gone into the next room; and you will presently get up and follow them, and yonder door will close upon you, and you will be no more seen.

Faith and hope bring us through time but leave us at the doorstep of eternity. Only love goes with us inside.

But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

The living can assist the imagination of the dead.

For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.

I do think there must be some kind of interaction between your living life and the life that goes on from here.

You haven't lost anything when you know were it is. Death can hide but not divide.

Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak.

Fasting detaches you from this world. Prayer reattaches you to the next world.

I prayed for all his dreams to come true. I prayed that I would always be able to connect with him--even if I was no longer on earth.

To be rich, to be famous? do these profit a year hence, when other names sound louder than yours, when you lie hidden away under ground, along with the idle titles engraven on your coffin? But only true love lives after you, follows your memory with secret blessings or pervades you, and intercedes for you. Non omnis moriar, if, dying, I yet live in a tender heart or two; nor am lost and hopeless, living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for me.

When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.

Love happens when you are ready to share with another human being. Prayer happens when you are ready to share with God.

Those who love are but one step from heaven.

I want you to know that should something happen to me, don’t worry about my body. My soul isn’t going to return to it, nor to God. It’s flying straight to you, where it knows it can find you, in Lazarevo. I want to be neither with kings nor heroes, but with the queen of Lake Ilmen.

Years ago I went to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and did what all tourists there do: wrote some words on a scrap of paper that I tucked into a crevice in the wall. When I closed my eyes and touched my head to the warm stone, it came to me: "All language is prayer." This must be so. Who is it we are speaking to when we speak to anyone? To that person, and also past him or her to Out There. If there is language, it means there is the possibility of being heard, being met, being loved. And reaching out to be heard, met, or loved is a holy act. Language is holy.

How beautiful to look at When my prayer Lights a candle of hope In my heart.

Love is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.

If I were dead and buried And I heard your voice, Beneath the sod My heart of dust Would still rejoice.

Love seems to survive life, and to reach beyond it. I think we take it with us past the grave. Do we not still give it to those who have left us? May we not hope that they feel it for us, and that we shall leave it here in one or two fond bosoms, when we also are gone?

No one is truly dead until they are no longer loved.

I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.

Once people are not here physically, the spiritual remains. We still connect, we can communicate, we can give and receive love and forgiveness. There is love after someone dies.