quotations about Heaven
To emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on heaven is to create hell.
TOM ROBBINS
Skinny Legs and All
Heaven and Hell are man's hopes and his fears extended beyond the grave.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
The way of Heaven and Earth may be completely declared in one sentence: They are without any doubleness, and so they produce things in a manner that is unfathomable.
CONFUCIUS
The Doctrine of the Mean
Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect.
RICHARD BACH
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.
BUDDHIST PROVERB
S'pose Heaven's not like a painting that's just hanging there for ever, but more like ... Like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you're alive, from passing cars, or ... upstairs windows when you're lost ...
DAVID MITCHELL
The Bone Clocks
You will say, how can one reach heaven to lay anything there? I will ask you also another question. How can a man being in France reach into England to lay anything there? By exchange.... You know that to avoid the danger of pirates and the inconvenience of foreign coin not current at home, it is the use of merchants to pay it there, to receive it here. Such a thing is there in this "laying up." We are here as strangers; the place where we wish ourselves is our country, even paradise--if so be we send our carriage thither before; if not, I fear we intend some other place, it is not our country.
LANCELOT ANDREWES
Ninety-six Sermons
I tell you, Heaven is a real, literal, physical place, a city as material, as physical, as literal as Chicago or London or New York or Tokyo.
JOHN R. RICE
Bible Facts about Heaven
Heaven for climate, and hell for society.
MARK TWAIN
speech to the Acorn Society, 1901
It is possible that the distance of heaven lies wholly in the veil of flesh, which we now want power to penetrate. A new sense, a new eye, might show the spiritual world compassing us on every side.
WILLIAM E. CHANNING
Thoughts
Aim at heaven and you will get earth "thrown in": aim at earth and you will get neither.
C. S. LEWIS
Mere Christianity
Seeking Heaven through righteousness is not seeking righteousness, but something else;--it is not loving goodness for goodness' sake, but for its rewards.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Damned
The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
First Inaugural Address, Apr. 30, 1789
I think Heaven will be like a first kiss.
SARAH ADDISON ALLEN
The Sugar Queen
I dare not think that any supercelestial heaven, or whatsoever else ... was increate and eternal. And as for the place of God before the world created, the finite wisdom of mortal men hath no perception of it; neither can it limit the seat of infinite power, no more than infinite power itself can be limited; for his place is in himself, whom no magnitude else can contain.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
The First Part of the History of the World: Intreating of the Beginning and First Ages of the Same
Heaven is homelike, we are told,
To beggars as to kings;
And resurrection is a fashion
Antedating wings.
NELLIE SEELYE EVANS
"Equality"
I cannot be content with less than heaven.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Festus
The Saviour said He was going to prepare us a place. How wonderful it will be is beyond human computation. Remember that in six days Christ made the heavens and earth and all that in them is.... If He made so many wonders in six days, then what beauties and marvels He has surely prepared during these 1900 years in which He has been preparing our mansions in the Father's House!
JOHN R. RICE
Bible Facts about Heaven
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
attributed, Philosophy on the Go