PARADISE QUOTES
quotations about paradise
A book of verses underneath the bough
A flask of wine, a loaf of bread and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness
And wilderness is paradise now
OMAR KHAYYAM
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Paradise is not a garden of bliss and changeless perfection where the lions lie down like lambs (what would they eat?) and the angels and cherubim and seraphim rotate in endless idiotic circles, like clockwork, about an equally inane and ludicrous -- however roseate -- unmoved mover. That particular painted fantasy of a realm beyond time and space which Aristotle and the church fathers tried to palm off on us has met, in modern times, only neglect and indifference passing on into oblivion it so richly deserved, while the paradise of which I write and wish to praise is with us yet, the here and now, the actual, tangible, dogmatically real earth on which we stand.
EDWARD ABBEY
Desert Solitaire
Doom is nigh. I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check their faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Speak, Memory
Much better an intelligent hell than a stupid paradise.
VICTOR HUGO
Ninety-Three
Take me down
To the paradise city
Where the grass is green
And the girls are pretty
Oh, won't you please take me home
GUNS N' ROSES
"Paradise City"
A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell.
THOMAS FULLER
The Holy State and the Profane State
A person who has not completely lost the memory of paradise, even though it is a faint one, will suffer endlessly. He will feel the call of the essential world, will hear the voice that comes from so far away that one cannot find out where it comes from, a voice that cannot guide him.
EUGENE IONESCO
Present Past / Past Present
Postulating a heaven gives man an out for having been unable to retain the paradise he was given here on earth.
SHERI S. TEPPER
A Plague of Angels
The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.
MARCEL PROUST
Time Regained
A chaste generation would restore Paradise.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
The whole of human history is thus enfolded in the subtle interplay of sorrow over a lost paradise, and the hope of its final restoration.
ALISTER E. MCGRATH
A Brief History of Heaven
Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two, opulence is when you have three -- and paradise is when you have none.
DOUG LARSON
attributed, Asterisk: The Future of Telephony
When the storm is over and night falls and the moon is out in all its glory and all you're left with is the rhythm of the sea, of the waves, you know what God intended for the human race, you know what paradise is.
HAROLD PINTER
Party Time
How small these rescued tides appear! Earthly delights flow in torrents. Each object offers paradise.
ANDRÉ BRETON
The Magnetic Fields
A cowchip is paradise for a fly.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.
REBECCA SOLNIT
A Paradise Built in Hell
Paradise is not a place, it's a state of mind.
ANONYMOUS
See the wretch that long has tost
On the thorny bed of pain,
At length repair his vigour lost,
And breathe and walk again:
The meanest floweret of the vale,
The simplest note that swells the gale,
The common sun, the air, the skies,
To him are open paradise.
THOMAS GRAY
Ode on the Pleasure Arising from Vicissitudes
Paradise was always over there, a day's sail away.
J. MAARTEN TROOST
Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu
Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
MILAN KUNDERA
The Unbearable Lightness of Being