“What difference does it make after all? — anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind.”
Part Three, Ch. 11
Source: On the Road (1957)
Context: In 1942 I was the star in one of the filthiest dramas of all time. I was a seaman, and went to the Imperial Café on Scollay Square in Boston to drink; I drank sixty glasses of beer and retired to the toilet, where I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl and went to sleep. During the night at least a hundred seamen and assorted civilians came in and cast their sentient debouchements on me till I was unrecognizably caked. What difference does it make after all? — anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind.
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Jack Kerouac 266
American writer 1922–1969Related quotes
Source: Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
"All Pervading Consciousness"
Context: Yet what are seas and what is air? For all
Is God, and but a talisman are heaven and earth
To veil Divinity. For heaven and earth,
Did He not permeate them, were but names;
Know then, that both this visible world and that
Which unseen is, alike are God Himself,
Naught is, save God: and all that is, is God.
“After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?”
Source: Maurice
“and that is what heaven is for, for understanding your life on Earth.”
Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven
“Knowing heaven is what heals us on earth.”
Source: The First Phone Call from Heaven
“What makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven.”
Variant: No, it's not fair, but what makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven.
Source: Damned (2011)
“What rage for fame attends both great and small!
Better be damned than mentioned not at all.”
To the Royal Academicians; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
i.254-255
Paradise Lost (1667)
Variant: The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.
Source: Paradise Lost: Books 1-2
“Seek on earth what you have found in heaven.”
As quoted in The Unpractised Heart (1942) by Leonard Alfred George Strong, p. 147