
“The best miracle is to be sent to paradise without paying a ticket.”
The Secrets of Ishbar (1996)
“The best miracle is to be sent to paradise without paying a ticket.”
“Rats in paradise! Rats in paradise!”
Song lyrics, Mutiny (1993), Mutiny in Heaven
65; a slight variant of this statement was later published in Parables and Paradoxes (1946):
The expulsion from Paradise is in its main significance eternal:
Consequently the expulsion from Paradise is final, and life in this world irrevocable, but the eternal nature of the occurrence (or, temporally expressed, the eternal recapitulation of the occurrence) makes it nevertheless possible that not only could we live continuously in Paradise, but that we are continuously there in actual fact, no matter whether we know it here or not.
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)
Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face
Context: There is nothing between the paradise dreamed of and the paradise lost. There is nothing, since we always want what we have not got. We hope, and then we regret. We hope for the future, and then we turn to the past, and then we begin slowly and desperately to hope for the past! The two most violent and abiding feelings, hope and regret, both lean upon nothing. To ask, to ask, to have not! Humanity is exactly the same thing as poverty. Happiness has not the time to live; we have not really the time to profit by what we are. Happiness, that thing which never is — and which yet, for one day, is no longer!
In a 2009 interview
Quoted in "Soleimani, a General Who Became Iran Icon by Targeting US" https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/01/02/world/middleeast/ap-ml-iran-qassem-soleimani.html. The Associated Press
“Paradise is here, my good man. God, give me no other paradise!”
Freedom and Death (1956)
Context: God, what is all this talk put out by the popes? Paradise is here, my good man. God, give me no other paradise!
al-Ghazali https://awakenthegreatnesswithin.com/35-inspirational-imam-al-ghazali-quotes-on-success/
“Through faith we are restored to paradise and created anew.”
Source: The Freedom of a Christian (1520), p. 74