Quotes about heaven
page 10

Zhuangzi photo

“To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.”

Zhuangzi (-369–-286 BC) classic Chinese philosopher

Book XXIII, ¶ 7,as rendered in the epigraph to Ch. 3 of The Lathe of Heaven (1971) by Ursula K. Le Guin, based upon the 1891 translation by James Legge, Le Guin was subsequently informed that this was a very poor translation, as there were no lathes in China in the time of Zhuangzi. The full passage as translated by Legge reads:
He whose mind is thus grandly fixed emits a Heavenly light. In him who emits this heavenly light men see the (True) man. When a man has cultivated himself (up to this point), thenceforth he remains constant in himself. When he is thus constant in himself, (what is merely) the human element will leave him, but Heaven will help him. Those whom their human element has left we call the people of Heaven. Those whom Heaven helps we call the Sons of Heaven. Those who would by learning attain to this seek for what they cannot learn. Those who would by effort attain to this, attempt what effort can never effect. Those who aim by reasoning to reach it reason where reasoning has no place. To know to stop where they cannot arrive by means of knowledge is the highest attainment. Those who cannot do this will be destroyed on the lathe of Heaven.

Richard Rodríguez photo
John Wesley photo

“I desire to have both heaven and hell ever in my eye, while I stand on this isthmus of life, between two boundless oceans.”

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

Letter to Charles Wesley
General sources

Edward Young photo
Margaret Fuller photo

“I prize thy gentle heart,
Free from ambition, falsehood, or art,
And thy good mind,
Daily refined,
By pure desire
To fan the heaven-seeking fire.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Life Without and Life Within (1859), A Greeting

Clive Staples Lewis photo

“Their own strength has betrayed them. They have…pulled down Deep Heaven on their heads.”

Source: That Hideous Strength (1945), Ch. 13 : They Have Pulled Down Deep Heaven on Their Heads

Thomas Carlyle photo
Athanasius of Alexandria photo
Mike Oldfield photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Ganapathy Sachchidananda Swamiji photo
Joseph Smith, Jr. photo
Stevie Smith photo

“All the same, there is a difficulty. I should like him to be happy in heaven here,
But he cannot come by wishing. Only by being already at home here.”

Stevie Smith (1902–1971) poet, novelist, illustrator, performer

"God Speaks"
Selected Poems (1962)

Anne Brontë photo
Thomas Dekker photo
Joseph Hopkinson photo
Carl Sagan photo
Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd photo

“One I have loved, uneluding, dearly possessed,
Two I have wooed, by greater praise be they blessed –
Three, yea, and four, with fortune lavish of gold,
Five maidens I've won their white flesh fair to behold,
And six more bright than the sun on my city's strong walls
With never a treacherous rede to blemish delight;
Seven by heaven! though hardly won was the fight –
Yea eight of whom I have sung: but to bridle the tongue
Lest heedless a careless word slip – the teeth they are strong!”

Keueisy vun dunn diwyrnawd;
keueisy dwy, handid mwy eu molawd;
keueisy deir a pheddir a phawd;
keueisy bymp o rei gwymp eu gwyngnawd;
keueisy chwech heb odech pechawd;
gwen glaer uch gwengaer yt ym daerhawd;
keueisy sseith ac ef gweith gordygnawd;
keueisy wyth yn hal pwyth peth or wawd yr geint;
ys da deint rac tauaed.
"Gorhoffedd" (The Boast), line 75; translation from Robert Gurney Bardic Heritage (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969) p. 41.

John Vance Cheney photo
James Anthony Froude photo
David Garrick photo

“Are these the choice dishes the Doctor has sent us?
Is this the great poet whose works so content us?
This Goldsmith’s fine feast, who has written fine books?
Heaven sends us good meat, but the Devil sends cooks?”

David Garrick (1717–1779) English actor, playwright, theatre manager and producer

Epigram on Goldsmith’s Retaliation. Vol. ii. p. 157. Compare: "God sendeth and giveth both mouth and the meat", Thomas Tusser, A Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1557); "God sends meat, and the Devil sends cooks", John Taylor, Works, vol. ii. p. 85 (1630).

Brigham Young photo
Charles Taze Russell photo
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk photo

“We do not consider our principles as dogmas contained in books that are said to come from heaven. We derive our inspiration, not from heaven, or from an unseen world, but directly from life.”

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) Turkish army officer, revolutionary, and the first President of Turkey

Statement (1 November 1937), as quoted in Atatürk: The Biography of the founder of Modern Turkey (2002) by Andrew Mango

John Milton photo

“Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

At a Solemn Music (c. 1637), line 1

Thomas Carlyle photo
Margaret Junkin Preston photo

“The pure memories given
To help our joy on earth, when earth is past,
Shall help our joy in heaven.”

Margaret Junkin Preston (1820–1897) American writer

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 407.

Emma Goldman photo
Henri-Frédéric Amiel photo

“There is but one thing needful — to possess God. All our senses, all our powers of mind and soul, all our external resources, are so many ways of approaching the divinity, so many modes of tasting and of adoring God. We must learn to detach ourselves from all that is capable of being lost, to bind ourselves absolutely only to what is absolute and eternal, and to enjoy the rest as a loan, as a usufruct…. To worship, to comprehend, to receive, to feel, to give, to act: this our law, our duty, our happiness, our heaven.”

Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881) Swiss philosopher and poet

16 July 1848
Only one thing is necessary: to possess God — All the senses, all the forces of the soul and of the spirit, all the exterior resources are so many open outlets to the Divinity; so many ways of tasting and of adoring God. We should be able to detach ourselves from all that is perishable and cling absolutely to the eternal and the absolute and enjoy the all else as a loan, as a usufruct…. To worship, to comprehend, to receive, to feel, to give, to act: this our law, our duty, our happiness, our heaven.
As translated in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries

“I have been strongly influenced by the Mahabharata, discourses of the Buddha, Sri Aurobindo and Plato. My masters have been Vyasa, Buddha and Sri Aurobindo, as elucidated by Ram Swarup. … Paganism was a term of contempt invented by Christianity for people in the countryside who lived close to and in harmony with Nature, and whose ways of worship were spontaneous as opposed to the contrived though-categories constructed by Christianity’s city-based manipulators of human minds. In due course, the term was extended to cover all spiritually spontaneous culture of the world – Greek, Roman, Iranian, Indian, Chinese, native American. It became a respectable term for those who revolted against Christianity in the modern West. But it has yet to recover its spiritual dimension which Christianity had eclipsed. For me, Hinduism preserves ancient Paganism in all its dimensions. In that sense, I am a Pagan. The term "Polytheism' comes from Biblical discourse, which has the term 'theism' as its starting point. I have no use for these terms. They create confusion. I dwell in a different universe of discourse which starts with 'know thyself' and ends with the discovery, 'thou art that'…
I met her [Mother Theresa] briefly in Calcutta in 1954 or 1955 when she was unknown. I had gone to see an American journalist who was a friend and had fallen ill, when she came to his house asking for money for her charity set-up. The friend went inside to get some cash, leaving his five or six year old daughter in the drawing room. Teresa told her, "He is not your real father. Your real father is in heaven." The girl said, "He is very ill." Theresa commented, "If he dies, your father does not die. For your real father who is in heaven never 'dies."”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

The girl was in tears.
Interview, The Observer. Date : February 22, 1997. http://sathyavaadi.tripod.com/truthisgod/Articles/goel.htm https://egregores.blogspot.com/2009/10/buddha-sri-aurobindo-and-plato.html https://egregores.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/hindus-and-pagans-a-return-to-the-time-of-the-gods/

Revilo P. Oliver photo

“The first Christian who can write decent Latin is Minucius Felix, whose Octavius, written in the first half (possibly the first quarter) of the Third Century must have done much to make Christianity respectable. He concentrates on ridiculing pagan myths that no educated man believed anyway and on denying that Christians (he means his kind, of course!) practice incest (a favorite recreation of many sects that had been saved by Christ from the tyranny of human laws) or cut the throats of children to obtain blood for Holy Communion (as some groups undoubtedly did). He argues for a monotheism that is indistinguishable from the Stoic except that the One God is identified as the Christian deity, from whose worship the sinful Jews are apostates, and insists that Christians have nothing to do with the Jews, whom God is going to punish. What is interesting is that Minucius has nothing to say about any specifically Christian doctrine, and that the names of Jesus or Christ do not appear in his work. There is just one allusion: the pagans say that Christianity was founded by a felon (unnamed) who was crucified. That, says Minucius, is absurd: no criminal ever deserved, nor did a man of this world have the power, to be believed to be a god (erratis, qui putatis deum credi aut meruisse noxium aut potuisse terrenum). That ambiguous reference is all that he has to say about it; he turns at once to condemning the Egyptians for worshipping a mortal man, and then he argues that the sign of the cross represents (a) the mast and yard of a ship under sail, and (b) the position of man who is worshipping God properly, i. e. standing with outstretched arms. If Minucius is not merely trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the gullible pagans, it certainly sounds as though this Christian were denying the divinity of Christ, either regarding him, as did many of the early Christians, as man who was inspired but was not to be identified with God, or claiming, as did a number of later sects, that what appeared on earth and was crucified was merely a ghost, an insubstantial apparition sent by Christ, who himself prudently stayed in his heaven above the clouds and laughed at the fools who thought they could kill a phantom. Of course, our holy men are quite sure that he was "orthodox."”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

Sun Myung Moon photo
Luís de Camões photo

“Ah! where shall weary man take sanctuary,
where live his little span of life secure?
and 'scape of Heaven serene th' indignant storms
that launch their thunders at us earthen worms?”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Onde pode acolher-se um fraco humano,
Onde terá segura a curta vida,
Que não se arme, e se indigne o Céu sereno
Contra um bicho da terra tão pequeno?
Stanza 106, lines 5–8 (tr. Richard Francis Burton)
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto I

Pearl S.  Buck photo
Pablo Neruda photo

“There in Rangoon I realized that the gods
were enemies, just like God,
of the poor human being.
Gods
in alabaster extended
like white whales,
gods gilded like spikes,
serpent gods entwining
the crime of being born,
naked and elegant buddhas
smiling at the cocktail party
of empty eternity
like Christ on his horrible cross,
all of them capable of anything,
of imposing on us their heaven,
all with torture or pistol
to purchase piety or burn our blood,
fierce gods made by men
to conceal their cowardice,
and there it was all like that,
the whole earth reeking of heaven,
and heavenly merchandise.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Allí en Rangoon comprendí que los dioses
eran tan enemigos como Dios
del pobre ser humano.
Dioses
de alabastro tendidos
como ballenas blancas,
dioses dorados como las espigas,
dioses serpientes enroscados
al crimen de nacer,
budhas desnudos y elegantes
sonriendo en el coktail
de la vacía eternidad
como Cristo en su cruz horrible,
todos dispuestos a todo,
a imponernos su cielo,
todos con llagas o pistola
para comprar piedad o quemarnos la sangre,
dioses feroces del hombre
para esconder la cobardía,
y allí todo era así,
toda la tierra olía a cielo,
a mercadería celeste.
Religión en el Este (Religion in the East) from Memorial of Isla Negra [Memorial de Isla Negra] (1964), trans. by Anthony Kerrigan in Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda [Houghton Mifflin, 1990, ISBN 0-395-54418-1] (p. 463).

Sarvajna photo
William Herschel photo
Fritz Leiber photo

“It was always worth everything to get away by himself, climb a bit, and study the heavens.”

Source: The Wanderer (1964), Chapter 3 (p. 26).

Michel De Montaigne photo
Edward Thomson photo
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot photo

“I thank heaven that I was born in the same century as this remarkable artist”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) French landscape painter and printmaker in etching

= Daubigny
a remark c. 1865; as quoted in Corot, Gary Tinterow, Michael Pantazzi, Vincent Pomarède - Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (France), National Gallery of Canada, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.), 1996, p. 272 – quote 65
1860s

John Ruysbroeck photo
James Fenimore Cooper photo
Pete Seeger photo

“To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time for every purpose under heaven.”

Pete Seeger (1919–2014) American folk singer

"Turn! Turn! Turn!" (1954); a song which adapts a passage from the book of Ecclesiastes to music, with a few additional lyrics.

Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford photo

“A place of dream, the Holy Land
Hangs midway between earth and heaven.”

Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford (1835–1921) American author

The Holy Land.

Lafcadio Hearn photo
Mike Oldfield photo

“Heaven and Earth are turning
Round the Earth fire is burning.
Sheltered from the cruel storm
Peace on Earth is new born”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, The Millennium Bell (1999)

Josh Homme photo

“If ignorance is bliss, then I'm in heaven now.”

Josh Homme (1973) American musician

"3's & 7's", Era Vulgaris (2007)
Lyrics, Queens of the Stone Age

John Fante photo
Kent Hovind photo
William Beebe photo
William Lane Craig photo

“Heaven may not be a possible world when you take it in isolation by itself. It may be that the only way in which God could actualize a heaven of free creatures all worshiping Him and not falling into sin would be by having, so to speak, this run-up to it, this advance life during which there is a veil of decision-making in which some people choose for God and some people against God. Otherwise you don't know that heaven is an actualizable world. You have no way of knowing that possibility.”

William Lane Craig (1949) American Christian apologist and evangelist

[The Craig-Bradley Debate: Can a Loving God Send People to Hell?, 1994, http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/craig-bradley0.html], quoted in [William Lane Craig vs. Ray Bradley (debate review), Luke, Muehlhauser, 2011-04-27, Common Sense Atheism, http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=2523, 2011-10-21]

Jerry Cantrell photo

“On "Heaven Beside You."”

Jerry Cantrell (1966) American musician and songwriter

http://bleedforaic.wixsite.com/bleed/tripod-english-c13qx, Interview with Request Magazine, February 1996
Song meanings

Ellen G. White photo
Elaine Goodale Eastman photo

“Thy subtle charm is strangely given,
My fancy will not let thee be,,
Then poise not thus 'twixt earth and heaven,
O white anemone!”

Elaine Goodale Eastman (1863–1953) American novelist, poet

Anemone; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 26.

Samuel Butler photo

“Heaven is the work of the best and kindest men and women. Hell is the work of prigs, pedants and professional truth-tellers. The world is an attempt to make the best of both.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Heaven and Hell
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part II - Elementary Morality

“Sir king, I have been often accused of harbouring traitorous designs against you, but, as God in heaven is just and true, may this morsel of bread choke me if even in thought I have ever been false to you.”

Godwin, Earl of Wessex Anglo-Saxon nobleman; son of Wulfnoth Cild

The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon (trans. Thomas Forester), Book VI
Godwin supposedly said this just before he choked to death on a piece of bread at the table of King Edward "the Confessor", but the story is very doubtful.
Misattributed

Charles Baudelaire photo

“O wise among all Angels ordinate,
God foiled of glory, god betrayed by fate,
Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!
O Prince of Exile doomed to heinous wrong,
Who, vanquished, riseth ever stark and strong,
Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!
Thou knowest all, proud king of occult things,
Familiar healer of man's sufferings,
Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!
Thy love wakes thirst for Heaven in one and all:
Leper, pimp, outcast, fool and criminal,
Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!”

<p>Ô toi, le plus savant et le plus beau des Anges,
Dieu trahi par le sort et privé de louanges,</p><p>Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!</p><p>Ô Prince de l'exil, à qui l'on a fait tort
Et qui, vaincu, toujours te redresses plus fort,</p><p>Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!</p><p>Toi qui sais tout, grand roi des choses souterraines,
Guérisseur familier des angoisses humaines,</p><p>Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!</p><p>Toi qui, même aux lépreux, aux parias maudits,
Enseignes par l'amour le goût du Paradis,</p><p>Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!
"Les Litanies de Satan" [Litanies of Satan] http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Litanies_de_Satan
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)

William Bradford photo
Jeremy Taylor photo

“Now heaven be thanked, I am out of love again!
I have been long a slave, and now am free;”

Jan Struther (1901–1953) British writer

FREEDOM, BETSINDA DANCES AND OTHER POEMS

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu photo
Rose Wilder Lane photo
Julian of Norwich photo
John Campbell Shairp photo

“Not as men of science, not as critics, not as philosophers, but as little children, shall we enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

John Campbell Shairp (1819–1885) British writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 332.

Basil of Caesarea photo
William Hazlitt photo

“The perfect joys of heaven do not satisfy the cravings of nature.”

"On the Literary Character" (28 October 1813)
The Round Table (1815-1817)

Ibn Khaldun photo
John Ogilby photo

“Ah! who may hope, when Heaven hath Help deni'd!”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro (2nd ed. 1654), Virgil's Æneis

Thomas Holley Chivers photo
Gildas photo

“Meanwhile these islands, stiff with cold and frost, and in a distant region of the world, remote from the visible sun, received the beams of light, that is, the holy precepts of Christ, the true Sun, showing to the whole world his splendour, not only from the temporal firmament, but from the height of heaven, which surpasses every thing temporal, at the latter part, as we know, of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, by whom his religion was propagated without impediment, and death threatened to those who interfered with its professors.”
Interea glaciali figore rigenti insulae et velut longiore terrarum secessu soli visibili non proximae verus ille non de firmamento solum temporali sed de summa etiam caelorum arce tempora cuncta excedente universo orbi praefulgidum sui coruscum ostendens, tempore, ut scimus, summo Tiberii Caesaris, quo absque ullo impedimento delatoribus militum eiusdem, radios suos primum indulget, id est sua praecepta, Christus.

Section 8.
De Excidio Britanniae (On the Ruin of Britain)

Michael Moorcock photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Thomas Moore photo

“And giving men power to steer their path across the sea with heaven as their guide.”
Et dedit aequoreos caelo duce tendere cursus.

Source: Argonautica, Book I, Line 483

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“for earth were too like heaven,
If length of life to love were given.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Improvisatrice (1824)

Sri Aurobindo photo

“If Hell were possible, it would be the shortest cut to the highest heaven. For verily God loveth.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Bhakti

Sun Myung Moon photo
Josemaría Escrivá photo
Alfred Horsley Hinton photo

“A little thought, however, will show that both aerial and linear perspective play as important a part in the heavens as on the earth beneath.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Perspective of clouds, p. 96

Syed Ahmad Barelvi photo
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux photo

“To support Thy rights, heaven-condoned, Destroy all else; that is the spirit of the Church.”

Pour soutenir tes droits, que le ciel autorise,
Abime tout plutôt ; c'est l'esprit de l'Église.
Le Lutrin (1683) I, 185

Nathaniel Parker Willis photo

“He who binds
His soul to knowledge, steals the key of heaven.”

Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806–1867) American magazine writer, editor, and publisher

Willis, The Scholar of Thibét Ben Khorat, II. Quote reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 419-23.

Kent Hovind photo
Cassiodorus photo

“For, among the world's incertitudes, this thing called arithmetic is established by a sure reasoning that we comprehend as we do the heavenly bodies. It is an intelligible pattern, a beautiful system, that both binds the heavens and preserves the earth. For is there anything that lacks measure, or transcends weight? It includes all, it rules all, and all things have their beauty because they are perceived under its standard.”
Haec enim quae appellatur arithmetica inter ambigua mundi certissima ratione consistit, quam cum caelestibus aequaliter novimus: evidens ordo, pulchra dispositio, cognitio simplex, immobilis scientia, quae et superna continet et terrena custodit. quid est enim quod aut mensuram non habeat aut pondus excedat? omnia complectitur, cuncta moderatur et universa hinc pulchritudinem capiunt, quia sub modo ipsius esse noscuntur.

Bk. 1, no. 10; p. 12.
Variae

Bel Kaufmanová photo
Hermann Samuel Reimarus photo
Charles A. Beard photo

“The word science of administration has been used. There are many who object to the term. Now if by science is meant a conceptual scheme of things in which every particularity coveted may be assigned a mathematical value, then administration is not a science. In this sense only astro-physics may be called a science and it is well to remember that mechanical laws of the heavens tell us nothing about the color and composition of the stars and as yet cannot account for some of the disturbances and explosions which seem accidental. If, on the other hand, we may rightly use the term science in connection with a body of exact knowledge derived from experience and observation, and a body of rules or axioms which experience has demonstrated to be applicable in concrete practice, and to work out in practice approximately as forecast, then we may, if we please, appropriately and for convenience, speak of a science of administration. Once, when the great French mathematician, Poincaré, was asked whether Euclidean geometry is true, he replied that the question had no sense but that Euclidean geometry is and still remains the most convenient. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that a science is, among other things, a particular branch of knowledge or study; a recognized department of learning.”

Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) American historian

Source: Philosophy, Science and Art of Public Administration (1939), p. 660-1

Logan Pearsall Smith photo

“Thank heavens, the sun has gone in, and I don't have to go out and enjoy it.”

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

"Last words" — these are not actually Smith's last words, but a section title).
All Trivia: Trivia, More Trivia, Afterthoughts, Last Words (1933)

Jonathan Safran Foer photo
Charles Fort photo
N.T. Wright photo

“At no point do the resurrection narratives in the four Gospels say, "Jesus has been raised, therefore we are all going to heaven." It says that Christ is coming here, to join together the heavens and the Earth in an act of new creation.”

N.T. Wright (1948) Anglican bishop

as interviewed by David Van Biema, "Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop," Time Magazine, Feb. 07, 2008 http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1710844,00.html

“Why are the heavens not filled with light? Why is the universe plunged into darkness?”

Edward Robert Harrison (1919–2007) British astronomer

Darkness at Night: a Riddle of the Universe (1987), p. 1

Julian Simon photo