Quotes about heaven (2869 quotes, page 24)

“Beware! By Allah the son of Abu Quhafah (Abu Bakr) dressed himself with it (the caliphate) and he certainly knew that my position in relation to it was the same as the position of the axis in relation to the hand-mill. The flood water flows down from me and the bird cannot fly upto me. I put a curtain against the caliphate and kept myself detached from it.
Then I began to think whether I should assault or endure calmly the blinding darkness of tribulations wherein the grown up are made feeble and the young grow old and the true believer acts under strain till he meets Allah (on his death). I found that endurance thereon was wiser. So I adopted patience although there was pricking in the eye and suffocation (of mortification) in the throat. I watched the plundering of my inheritance till the first one went his way but handed over the Caliphate to Ibn al-Khattab after himself.
(Then he quoted al-A`sha's verse):
My days are now passed on the camel's back (in difficulty) while there were days (of ease) when I enjoyed the company of Jabir's brother Hayyan.
It is strange that during his lifetime he wished to be released from the caliphate but he confirmed it for the other one after his death. No doubt these two shared its udders strictly among themselves. This one put the Caliphate in a tough enclosure where the utterance was haughty and the touch was rough. Mistakes were in plenty and so also the excuses therefore. One in contact with it was like the rider of an unruly camel. If he pulled up its rein the very nostril would be slit, but if he let it loose he would be thrown. Consequently, by Allah people got involved in recklessness, wickedness, unsteadiness and deviation.
Nevertheless, I remained patient despite length of period and stiffness of trial, till when he went his way (of death) he put the matter (of Caliphate) in a group and regarded me to be one of them. But good Heavens! what had I to do with this "consultation"? Where was any doubt about me with regard to the first of them that I was now considered akin to these ones? But I remained low when they were low and flew high when they flew high. One of them turned against me because of his hatred and the other got inclined the other way due to his in-law relationship and this thing and that thing, till the third man of these people stood up with heaving breasts between his dung and fodder. With him his children of his grand-father, (Umayyah) also stood up swallowing up Allah's wealth like a camel devouring the foliage of spring, till his rope broke down, his actions finished him and his gluttony brought him down prostrate.
At that moment, nothing took me by surprise, but the crowd of people rushing to me. It advanced towards me from every side like the mane of the hyena so much so that Hasan and Husayn were getting crushed and both the ends of my shoulder garment were torn. They collected around me like the herd of sheep and goats. When I took up the reins of government one party broke away and another turned disobedient while the rest began acting wrongfully as if they had not heard the word of Allah saying:
That abode in the hereafter, We assign it for those who intend not to exult themselves in the earth, nor (to make) mischief (therein); and the end is (best) for the pious ones. (Qur'an, 28:83)
Yes, by Allah, they had heard it and understood it but the world appeared glittering in their eyes and its embellishments seduced them. Behold, by Him who split the grain (to grow) and created living beings, if people had not come to me and supporters had not exhausted the argument and if there had been no pledge of Allah with the learned to the effect that they should not acquiesce in the gluttony of the oppressor and the hunger of the oppressed I would have cast the rope of Caliphate on its own shoulders, and would have given the last one the same treatment as to the first one. Then you would have seen that in my view this world of yours is no better than the sneezing of a goat.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Known as the Sermon of ash-Shiqshiqiyyah (roar of the camel), It is said that when Amir al-mu'minin reached here in his sermon a man of Iraq stood up and handed him over a writing. Amir al-mu'minin began looking at it, when Ibn `Abbas said, "O' Amir al-mu'minin, I wish you resumed your Sermon from where you broke it." Thereupon he replied, "O' Ibn `Abbas it was like the foam of a Camel which gushed out but subsided." Ibn `Abbas says that he never grieved over any utterance as he did over this one because Amir al-mu'minin could not finish it as he wished to.
Nahj al-Balagha

Death , Hunger , Children , People

“O Heaven! he cried, my bleeding country save!”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

Part I, line 359
Pleasures of Hope (1799)

Country

“But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose.”

John Keats Ode on Melancholy

"Ode on Melancholy", st. 2
Poems (1820)

Flowers

“Murder of non-Muslims is a merit : “The murder of infidels (even if they are innocent) is counted a merit in a Muslim. It is not necessary that he (Muslim) should have his own passion or mortify his flesh, it is not necessary for him to grow a rich growth of spirituality. He has only to slay a certain class of his fellow-beings (non-Muslims) or plunder their lands and wealth and this act is itself would raise his (Muslim’s) soul to Heaven. A religion where followers are taught to regard robbery and murder as a religious duty, is incompatible with the progress of manking or with the peace of the world.”

Jadunath Sarkar (1870–1958) Indian historian

The History of Aurangazeb. Vol. 3, pp. 161-169 by Sir Jadunath Sarkar; published by Orient Longman 1972

World , Peace , Religion , Soul

“Jesus' message is about love and compassion, but there is nothing loving or compassionate at factory farms and slaughterhouses, where billions of animals endure miserable lives and die violent deaths. Jesus mandates kindness and mercy for all God's creatures. He'd be appalled by the suffering that we inflict on animals today to indulge our acquired taste for their flesh. Catholics, and all Christians, have a choice. When we sit down to eat, we can add to the violence, misery and death in the world, or we can respect God's creatures with a vegetarian diet. I believe we're obligated to make choices that are as merciful as possible, and we can all do that at the dinner table with a vegetarian diet. There won't be any factory farms and slaughterhouses in heaven.”

Bruce Friedrich (1969) Member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

"Is Eating Meat A Catholic Sin?", interview by Hank Pellissier, in SFGate.com (2 February 2004) http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Is-Eating-Meat-A-Catholic-Sin-2802645.php

Love , Death , God , World

“For many Americans, these four months have brought sorrow, and pain that will never completely go away. Every day a retired firefighter returns to Ground Zero, to feel closer to his two sons who died there. At a memorial in New York, a little boy left his football with a note for his lost father: Dear Daddy, please take this to heaven. I don't want to play football until I can play with you again some day.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2002, State of the Union address (January 2002)

Pain , Feeling , Boy , Memory

“Under the plan of heaven, the husband and the wife walk side by side as companions, neither one ahead of the other, but a daughter of God and a son of God walking side by side. Let your families be families of love and peace and happiness. Gather your children around you and have your family home evenings, teach your children the ways of the Lord, read to them from the scriptures, and let them come to know the great truths of the eternal gospel as set forth in these words of the Almighty.”

Gordon B. Hinckley (1910–2008) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Selections from Addresses of President Gordon B. Hinckley, Ensign, Mar. 2001, 64.

Love , God , Children , Truth

“(Woman on telephone) Yes of course if you were imprisoned in a foreign land by a right-wing junta and our government was unresponsive to your plight, I would organize demonstrations and move heaven and earth for your release, but I'm not going to pick you up at the airport.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 110

“She leant upon her harp, and thousands looked
On her in love and wonder—thousands knelt
And worshipp'd in her presence—burning tears,
And words that died in utterance, and a pause
Of breathless, agitated eagerness,
First gave the full heart's homage: then came forth
A shout that rose to heaven; and the hills,
The distant valleys, all rang with the name
Of the Æolian Sappho—every heart
Found in itself some echo to her song.”

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

Sappho from The London Literary Gazette (4th May 1822) Poetic Sketches. 2nd Series - Sketch the First
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Love , Tear , Distant , Heart

“One could divine pretty nearly where the force lay, since the last ten years had given to the great mechanical energies — coal, iron, steam — a distinct superiority in power over the old industrial elements — agriculture, handwork, and learning; but the result of this revolution on a survivor from the fifties resembled the action of the earthworm; he twisted about, in vain, to recover his starting-point; he could no longer see his own trail; he had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage; a belated reveller, or a scholar-gipsy like Matthew Arnold's. His world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow — not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs — but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he — American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him, and an education that had cost a civil war.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

War , World , Education , Learning

“As the great eye of heaven, shyned bright,
And made a sunshine in the shady place.”

Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene

Canto 3, stanza 4
The Faerie Queene (1589–1596), Book I

“God has such a deep reverence for our freedom that he'd rather let us freely go to Hell than be compelled to go to Heaven.”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

Beyers Naudé memorial lecture (15 August 2003)

God , Hell , Freedom

“Let it be, that should be the motto of all public powers, since the world was civilized … That we cannot grow except by lowering our neighbors is a detestable notion! Only malice and malignity of heart is satisfied with such a principle and our (national) interest is opposed to it. Let it be, for heaven's sake! Let it be!”

Marc-René de Voyer de Paulmy d'Argenson

Laissez faire, telle devrait être la devise de toute puissance publique, depuis que le monde est civilisé ... Détestable principe que celui de ne vouloir grandir que par l'abaissement de nos voisins! Il n'y a que la méchanceté et la malignité du coeur de satisfaites dans ce principe, et l’intérêt y est opposé. Laissez faire, morbleu! Laissez faire!!
Marc-René de Voyer de Paulmy d'Argenson. Diary of René de Voyer, (1736); As quoted in J.M. Keynes, 1926, "The End of Laissez Faire". Argenson's Mémoirs were published only in 1858, ed. Jannet, Tome V, p. 362. See A. Oncken (Die Maxime Laissez faire et laissez passer, ihr Ursprung, ihr Werden, 1866)
Alternative translation:
Laissez faire ought to be the motto of every public authority
Quoted in: Mark Skousen. The Making of Modern Economics, (2009), p. 48

World , Heart

“There is silver blue, sky blue and thunder blue. Every color holds within it a soul, which makes me happy or repels me, and which acts as a stimulus. To a person who has no art in him, colors are colors, tones tones.... and that is all. All their consequences for the human spirit, which range between heaven to hell, just go unnoticed.”

Emil Nolde (1867–1956) German artist

Nolde's written note in 1942; as quoted in Nolde: Forbidden Pictures [exhibition catalog], Marlsborough Fine Art Ltd., London, 1970, p. 9
1921 - 1956

Art , Color , Soul , Hell

“Thy letter hath been perused. Were the truth of this Revelation to be fully demonstrated with elaborate proofs, all the scrolls that exist in the heaven and on the earth would be insufficient to contain them.
However, the substance and essence of the subject is this, that there can be no doubt that from everlasting God hath been invested with the independent sovereignty of His exalted Being, and unto everlasting He will remain inaccessible in the transcendent majesty of His holy Essence. No creature hath ever recognized Him as befitteth His recognition, nor hath any created being ever praised Him as is worthy of His praise. He is exalted above every name, and is sanctified from every comparison. Through Him all things are made known, while too lofty is His reality to be known through anyone but Him. The process of His creation hath had no beginning and can have no end, otherwise it would necessitate the cessation of His celestial grace. God hath raised up Prophets and revealed Books as numerous as the creatures of the world, and will continue to do so to everlasting.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

Dalá’Il-I-Sab‘ih

God , Truth , Books , World

“In general, how did the Son of Heaven come about? Did he descend from Heaven, or did he emerge from the earth? A leader is chosen to be the head of the neighborhood when five houses become neighbors. A leader is chosen to be the head of the village when five neighborhoods become neighbors. A leader is chosen to be the head of the county when five villages become neighbors. Several heads of counties choose a feudal lord, and several feudal lords choose the Son of Heaven. Thus the Son of Heaven is chosen by the people.”

Jeong Yak-yong (1762–1836) Korean scholar and philosopher

湯論

People , Housing

“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.
He saw the townlands
and learned the minds of many distant men,
and weathered many bitter nights and days
in his deep heart at sea, while he fought only
to save his life, to bring his shipmates home.
But not by will nor valor could he save them,
for their own recklessness destroyed them all—
children and fools, they killed and feasted on
the cattle of Lord Hêlios, the Sun,
and he who moves all day through the heaven
took from their eyes the dawn of their return.”

Robert Fitzgerald (1910–1985) American poet, critic and translator

opening lines
The Odyssey (1961)

Life , Men , Children , Fools

“Heaven is attracting to itself whatever is congenial to its nature, is enriching itself by the spoils of earth, and collecting within its capacious bosom whatever is pure, permanent, and divine.”

Robert Hall (1764–1831) British Baptist pastor

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 300.

Nature

“By My life! But for the obligation to acknowledge the Cause of Him Who is the Testimony of God … I would not have announced this unto thee… All the keys of heaven God hath chosen to place on My right hand, and all the keys of hell on My left…”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

Epistle to Muhammad Sháh

Life , God , Hell

“If I ask Him to receive me,
Will He say me nay?
Not till earth, and not till heaven
Pass away.”

Stephen the Hymnographer (725–802) Byzantine hymnographer and saint

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 153.

“Is it desired to call attention to this fact? Proclaim it upon the house-tops! Write it upon every leaf that trembles in the forest! Make it blaze from the sun at high noon and shine forth in the radiance of every star that bedecks the firmament of God. Let it echo through all the arches of heaven, and reverberate and bellow through all the deep gorges of hell, where slave catchers will be very likely to hear it. Owen Lovejoy lives at Princeton, Illinois, three-quarters of a mile east of the village, and he aids every fugitive that comes to his door and asks it. Thou invisible demon of slavery! Dost thou think to cross my humble threshold, and forbid me to give bread to the hungry and shelter to the houseless? I bid you defiance in the name of my God.”

Owen Lovejoy (1811–1864) American politician

As quoted in His Brother's Blood: Speeches and Writings, 1838–64 https://books.google.com/books?id=qMEv8DNXVbIC&pg=PA178 (2004), edited by William Frederick Moore and Jane Ann Moore, p. 178
Also quoted in The History of Abraham Lincoln, and the Overthrow of Slavery http://books.google.com/books?id=RW0FAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA225, by Isaac Newton Arnold
Also quoted as Yes, I do assist fugitive slaves to escape! Proclaim it upon the house-tops; write it upon every leaf that trembles in the forest; make it blaze from the sun at high noon, and shine forth in the radiance of every star that bedecks the firmament of God. Let it echo through all the arches of heaven, and reverberate and bellow through all the deep gorges of hell, where slave catchers will be very likely to hear it. Owen Lovejoy lives at Princeton, Illinois, and he aids every fugitive that comes to his door and asks it. Thou invisible demon of slavery! Dost thou think to cross my humble threshold, and forbid me to give bread to the hungry and shelter to the houseless? I bid you defiance in the name of God.
1850s, The Fanaticism of the Democratic Party (February 1859)

God , Star , Hell , Thinking

“Past are three summers since she first beheld
The ocean; all around the child await
Some exclamation of amazement here.
She coldly said, her long-lasht eyes abased,
Is this the mighty ocean? is this all?
That wondrous soul Charoba once possest,—
Capacious, then, as earth or heaven could hold,
Soul discontented with capacity,—
Is gone (I fear) forever. Need I say
She was enchanted by the wicked spells
Of Gebir, whom with lust of power inflamed
The western winds have landed on our coast?
I since have watcht her in lone retreat,
Have heard her sigh and soften out the name.”

Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) British writer

Gebir, Book I (1798). It is reported that "these lines were specially singled out for admiration by Shelley, Humphrey Davy, Scott, and many remarkable men"; Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), citing Forster, Life of Landor, vol. i. p. 95.

Fear , Soul , Past , Summer

“He who tears down the cross, what is there left to lift him to heaven? The church claiming to be a Christian church is false to the title, if she make the cross of Christ of none effect.”

Herrick Johnson (1832–1913) American clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 173.

Tear , Christ , Falseness

“Heaven knows that I have done all that a mortal could do, to save the people, and the failure was not my fault, but the fault of others.”

Davy Crockett (1786–1836) American politician

As quoted in David Crockett: The Man and the Legend (1994) by James Atkins Shackford, p. 106

People , Failure

“By these things my Mind was now so turned that it lay like a Horse-leech at the Vein, still crying out, Give give, yea, it was so fixed on Eternity, and on the things about the Kingdom of Heaven (that is, so far as I knew, though as yet… I knew but little); that neither Pleasures, nor Profits, nor Persuasions, nor Threats, could loosen it, or make it let go his Hold. …it is in very deed a certain Truth, it would then have been as difficult for me to have taken my mind from Heaven to Earth, as I have found it often since to get it again from Earth to Heaven.”

John Bunyan book Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners

Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666)

Pleasure , Truth , Horse , Cry

“I call 'parallelism' any kind of repetition. When I feel most strongly the charm of things in nature, there is always an impression of unity. If my way leads into a pine wood where the trees reach high into heaven, I see the trunks that stand to the right and to the left of me as countless columns. One and the same vertical line, repeated many times, surrounds me. Now, if these trunks should be clearly outlined on an unbroken dark background, if they should stand out against the deep blue of the sky, the reason for this impression of unity is parallelism.”

Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) Swiss artist

from: Die Kunst Ferdinand Hodlers, 1923

Way , Feeling , Nature , Tree

“An humble soul knows that little sins, if I may so call any, cost Christ his blood, and that they make way for greater; and that little sins multiplied become great, as a little sum multiplied is great; that they cloud the face of God, wound conscience, grieve the Spirit, rejoice Satan, and make work for repentance, &c. An humble soul knows that little sins, suppose them so, are very dangerous; a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump, a little staff may kill one; a little poison may poison one, a little leak in a ship sinks it; a little fly in the box of ointment spoils it; a little flaw in a good cause mars it; so a little sin may at once bar the door of heaven and open the gates of hell; and therefore an humble soul smites and strikes itself for the least as well as the greatest.”

Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) English Puritan

The Unsearchable Riches of Christ

God , Way , Soul , Hell

“Ye that follow the vision
Of the world's weal afar,
Have ye met with derision
And the red laugh of war;
Yet the thunder shall not hurt you,
Nor the battle-storms dismay;
Tho' the sun in heaven desert you,
"Love will find out the way."”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Song, Book VIII, p. 146
Drake, an English Epic (1908)

Love , War , World , Way

“There is no sorrow under heaven which is, or ought to be, endless. To believe or to make it so, is an insult to Heaven itself.”

Dinah Craik (1826–1887) English novelist and poet

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 10

“For singing till his heaven fills,
'Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup,
And he the wine which overflows
To lift us with him as he goes.”

George Meredith (1828–1909) British novelist and poet of the Victorian era

The Lark Ascending http://www.ev90481.dial.pipex.com/Meredith/lark_ascending.htm, l. 65-70 (1881).

Love , Wine , Singing

“[W]atching ducks land on a lake in Arkansas in the winter is about the closest to Heaven as you can find on this earth… and as someone who believes, according to my faith, I will go to Heaven when I die, I am pretty sure that there is duck hunting in Heaven!”

Mike Huckabee (1955) Arkansas politician

speaking to an NRA group
[Huckabee, Fluent in the NRA’s Language, Jim, Geraghty, 2007-09-21, National Review, http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/11849/huckabee-fluent-nras-language, 2011-03-01]

Faith , Winter

“It has been a long road from Plato's Meno to the present, but it is perhaps encouraging that most of the progress along that road has been made since the turn of the twentieth century, and a large fraction of it since the midpoint of the century. Thought was still wholly intangible and ineffable until modern formal logic interpreted it as the manipulation of formal tokens. And it seemed still to inhabit mainly the heaven of Platonic ideals, or the equally obscure spaces of the human mind, until computers taught us how symbols could be processed by machines.”

Allen Newell (1927–1992) American cognitive scientist

Source: Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search (1975), p. 125.

“Wisdom sits alone
Topmost in Heaven.”

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

The Scholar of Thibet.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)

Wisdom

“As I came through the desert thus it was,
As I came through the desert: All was black,
In heaven no single star, on earth no track;
A brooding hush without a stir or note;
The air so thick it clotted in my throat.”

James Thomson (B.V.) (1834–1882) Scottish writer (1834-1882)

Part VI
The City of Dreadful Night (1870–74)

Star

“What do you gain in heaven? You become gods, drink nectar, and get rheumatism. There is less misery there than on earth, but also less truth.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

God , Truth , Drink

“If Christianity has really come from heaven, it must renew the whole life of man; it must govern the life of nations no less than that of individuals; it must control a Christian when acting in his public and political capacity as completely as when he is engaged in the duties which belong to him as a member of a family circle.”

Henry Liddon (1829–1890) British theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 136.

Life , Family

“The author of the Gītā is interested in man and his destiny; for man is the centre of creation. Brahman, it is true, dwells equally in every living creature; but to man is given a gift denied even to the Lords of Heaven—man alone in all creation's scale can win release.”

W. Douglas P. Hill (1884–1962) British Indologist

Source: The Bhagavadgītā (1973), p. 43. (23. Man)

“We were picking apart a problem in linguistic history and, as it were, examining close up the peak period of glory in the history of a language; in minutes we had traced the path which had taken it several centuries. And I was powerfully gripped by the vision of transitoriness: the way before our eyes such a complex, ancient, venerable organism, slowly built up over many generations, reaches its highest point, which already contains the germ of decay, and the whole intelligently articulated structure begins to droop, to degenerate, to totter toward its doom. And at the same time the thought abruptly shot through me, with a joyful, startled amazement, that despite the decay and death of that language it had not been lost, that its youth, maturity, and downfall were preserved in our memory, in our knowledge of it and its history, and would survive and could at any time be reconstructed in the symbols and formulas of scholarship as well as in the recondite formulations of the Glass Bead Game. I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Death , Youth , World , Way

“God presents himself in the inmost depths of my soul. I understand not only that he is present, but also how he is present in every creature and in everything that has being, in a devil and a good angel, in heaven and hell, in good deeds and in adultery or homicide, in all things, finally, which exist or have some degree of being, whether beautiful or ugly. She further said: I also understand that he is no less present in a devil than a good angel. Therefore, while I am in this truth, I take no less delight in seeing or understanding his presence in a devil or in an act of adultery than I do in a good angel or in a good deed. This mode of divine presence in my soul has become almost habitual. Moreover, this mode of God's presence illuminates my soul with such great truth and bestows on it such divine graces that when my soul is in this mode it cannot commit any offense, and it receives an abundance of divine gifts. Because of this understanding of God's presence my soul is greatly humiliated and ashamed of its sins. It is also granted deep wisdom, great divine consolation, and joy.”

Angela of Foligno (1248–1309) Italian saint

Source: The Memorial and Instructions, pp. 212-213

Wisdom , God , Truth , Beauty

“Care in such sort that thou be sure of this:
Care keep thee not from heaven and heavenly bliss.”

William Byrd (1543–1623) British composer

Poem: Care for Thy Soul as Thing of Greatest Price http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/care-for-thy-soul-as-thing-of-greatest-price/

“To arrive at understanding from being one's true self is called nature, and to arrive at being one's true self from understanding is called culture. He who is his true self has thereby understanding, and he who has understanding finds thereby his true self.
Only those who are their absolute true selves in the world can fulfil their own nature; only those who fulfil their own nature can fulfil the nature of others; only those who fulfil the nature of others can fulfil the nature of things; those who fulfil the nature of things are worthy to help Mother Nature in growing and sustaining life; and those who are worthy to help Mother Nature in growing and sustaining life are the equals of heaven and earth.”

Zisi (-481–-402 BC) Chinese philosopher

Source: The Doctrine of the Mean, p. 123

Life , World , Understanding , Nature

“"Heaven! What have I done?" exclaimed he. "The vapor, the influence of that brute force,—it has bewildered me and obscured my perception. I have made the very stroke—the fatal stroke—that I have dreaded from the first. It is all over—the toil of months, the object of my life. I am ruined!"
And there he sat, in strange despair, until his lamp flickered in the socket and left the Artist of the Beautiful in darkness.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

"The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844)

Life , Beauty , Despair

“When Britain first, at Heaven's command,
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sung this strain:
'Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.”

James Thomson (poet) (1700–1748) Scottish writer (1700-1748)

Alfred, Act II, sc. v (1740).

Angels

“This was her finest role and the hardest one to play. Choosing between heaven and a ridiculous fidelity, preferring oneself to eternity or losing oneself in God is the age-old tragedy in which each must play his part.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

Source: The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Absurd Creation, p. 83

God , Age , Parting

“To see the heaven in your eyes is not so far,
'Cause I'm not afraid to try and go it,
To know the love and beauty never known before,
I'll leave it up to you to show it.”

Stevie Wonder (1950) American musician

Golden Lady
Song lyrics, Innervisions (1973)

Love , Beauty

“The moon makes her circuit of the heaven in twenty-eight days plus about an hour, and with her return to the sign from which she set forth, completes a lunar month.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book IX, Chapter I, Sec. 5

“I have climbed mountain Iwato of Higo in Kyushu to pay homage to heaven, pray to Kwannon, and kneel before Buddha. I am a warrior of Harima province, Shinmen Musashi No Kami Fujiwara No Genshin, age sixty years.
From youth my heart has been inclined toward the Way of strategy. My first duel was when I was thirteen, I struck down a strategist of the Shinto school, one Arima Kihei. When I was sixteen I struck down an able strategist Tadashima Akiyama. When I was twenty-one I went up to the capital and met all manner of strategists, never once failing to win in many contests.”

Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese martial artist, writer, artist

Go Rin No Sho (1645), Introduction

Youth , Age , School , Way

“He who seldom thinks of heaven is not likely to get thither; as the only way to hit the mark is to keep the eye fixed upon it.”

George Horne (1730–1792) English churchman, writer and university administrator

George Horne, Aphorisms and Opinions of Dr. George Horne http://books.google.com/books?id=lJECAAAAQAAJ 1857, p. 39

Way , Thinking

“The Phoenicians who from their sagacity and learning possess great insight into things divine, hold the doctrine that this universally diffused radiance is a part of the "Soul of the Stars." This opinion is consistent with sound reason: if we consider the light that is without body, we shall perceive that of such light the source cannot be a body, but rather the simple action of a mind, which spreads itself by means of illumination as far as its proper seat; to which the middle region of the heavens is contiguous, from which place it shines forth with all its vigour and fills the heavenly orbs, illuminating at the same time the whole universe with its divine and pure radiance.”

Julian (emperor) (331–363) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer

Upon the Sovereign Sun (362)

Soul , Star , Light , Learning

“Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book One, Chapter V.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book One

God , People , Age , Law

“I've learned some things from having lived:
If you're alive, experience largely, merge with rivers, heavens, cosmos
For what we call living is a gift given to life
And life is a gift bestowed upon us”

Ataol Behramoğlu (1942) Turkish writer

"I've Learned Some Things" (1977)
Variant translations:
There is one thing I learned from what I lived:
When you live, you must live big, like being one with the rivers, the sky, and the whole universe
Because what we call lifetime is a gift presented to life
And life is a gift presented to you.
Translated as "There Is One Thing I Learned From What I Lived" by Sãleyman Fatih Akgãl at TC Turkish Poetry Pages
I've Learned Some Things (2008)

Life , Learning

“What another being is life when we have found out our Father; and if we work, it is beneath His eye, and if we play, it is in the light and encouragement of His smile. Earth's sunshine is heaven's radiance, and the stars of night as if the beginning of the beatific vision; so soft, so sweet, so gentle, so reposeful, so almost infinite have all things become, because we have found our Father in our God.”

Frederick William Faber (1814–1863) British hymn writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 260.

Life , God , Smile , Star

“For though the sweet manhood of Christ might suffer but once, the goodness in Him may never cease of proffer: every day He is ready to the same, if it might be. For if He said He would for my love make new Heavens and new Earth, it were but little in comparison; for this might be done every day if He would, without any travail. But to die for my love so often that the number passeth creature’s reason, it is the highest proffer that our Lord God might make to man’s soul, as to my sight. Then meaneth He thus: How should it not be that I should not do for thy love all that I might of deeds which grieve me not, sith I would, for thy love, die so often, having no regard to my hard pains?”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Ninth Revelation, Chapter 22

Love , God , Pain , Soul

“Dear Miss Manners: What is the proper way to eat potato chips?
Gentle Reader: With a knife and fork. A fruit knife and an oyster fork, to be specific. Good heavens, what is the world coming to? Miss Manners does not mind explaining the finer points of gracious living, but she feels that anyone without the sense to pick up a potato chip and stuff it in their face should probably not be running around loose on the streets.”

Judith Martin (1938) American etiquette expert

Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior

World , Way , Feeling , Sense

“For God's sake! If I ran a dictatorship, then what is Lon Nol running? I renounced my throne to show the masses that there's no such thing as divine right, that no one descends from the heavens to rule the people.”

Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012) Cambodian King

Said during his exile in Peking, as quoted by Oriana Fallaci (June 1973), Intervista con la Storia (sixth edition, 2011). page 116.
Interviews

God , People

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1860s, Oration at Ravenna, Ohio (1865)

God , Fate , Box

“Lin had made two miscalculations. He was under the impression that the British Government was not a parry to the smuggling of opium, which like an honest man he thought was the activity of unscrupulous traders and of depraved and barbarous pirates. This is well brought out in the letters which he addressed to Queen Victoria. …. Indeed the British Government was committed up to the hilt in this illegal and depraved traffic and in the piracy which went along with it. This Lin did not and could not be expected to know, especially when his own view of the State, as a true Confucian, was a moral one, where the Emperor under a mandate of Heaven upheld the proprieties…. These miscalculations affected the result, but they did not alter the legal rectitude of Lin's action. Nor could they be held to justify the action of Elliot in forcing a war on the Chinese and giving his Government's moral authority to a commercial system based on illegal traffic in drugs enforced by organized piracy.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

War

“The doors of heaven and hell are adjacent and identical.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Last Temptation of Christ

Source: The Last Temptation of Christ (1951), Ch. 18

Hell

“It came upon the midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
From Angels bending near the earth
To touch their harps of gold;
"Peace on the earth, good will to man
From Heaven’s all gracious King."
The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels sing.”

Edmund Sears (1810–1876) American minister

The Angels' Song ("It Came Upon A Midnight Clear", 1849).

World , Peace , Angels , Singing

“Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

The chambered Nautilus; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Life , Art , Soul , Past

“My first question [upon ascending to Heaven], believe it or not, will be, 'Did Adam and Eve have a belly button?' I don't know why, but that has bothered me for years.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Unmasking the False Religion of Evolution (1996)

Question

“Let us desire to be like our brethren which be saints in Heaven, that will right nought but God’s will and are well pleased both with hiding and with shewing. For I saw soothly in our Lord’s teaching, the more we busy us to know His secret counsels in this or any other thing, the farther shall we be from the knowing thereof.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Thirteenth Revelation, Chapter 33

God , Secret , Business

“We must consider the words, "the heavens were opened" (Ezek. i. 1); they give the key to the understanding of the whole. The figure of opening, also that of opening the gates, occurs frequently in the books of the prophets… When he commences to describe the firmament in detail, he says, "the firmament," without adding the words "the likeness of," for he says, "And I looked, and behold, in the firmament that was above the head of the cherubims there appeared over them as it were a sapphire stone, as the appearance of the likeness of a throne" (Ezek x. 1). Here the prophet speaks of "the firmament" and not of "the likeness of the firmament,"…”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.7

Books , Understanding , Appearance

“In their religion they are so uneven,
That each man goes his own byway to heaven.”

Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) English trader, writer and journalist

Pt. II, l. 104.
The True-Born Englishman http://www.luminarium.org/editions/trueborn.htm (1701)

Religion

“How great is the path proper to the Sage! Like overflowing water, it sends forth and nourishes all things, and rises up to the height of heaven. All-complete is its greatness! It embraces the three hundred rules of ceremony, and the three thousand rules of demeanor. It waits for the proper man, and then it is trodden. Hence it is said, "Only by perfect virtue can the perfect path, in all its courses, be made a fact."”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Doctrine of the Mean

Water , Waiting , Perfection

“Here today we huddle tight
As the darkest heathens might
The snow falls chilly on our skin
The snow is forcing its way in.
Hush, snow, come in with us to dwell:
We were thrown out by Heaven as well.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

"Christmas legend" [Weinachtslegende] (1923), Berliner Börsen-Courier (25 December 1924); trans. in Poems, 1913-1956, p. 99
Poems, 1913-1956 (1976)

Way

“Speak to any small man of a high, majestic Reformation, of a high majestic Luther; and forthwith he sets about “accounting” for it; how the “circumstances of the time” called for such a character, and found him, we suppose, standing girt and road-ready, to do its errand; how the “circumstances of the time” created, fashioned, floated him quietly along into the result; how, in short, this small man, had he been there, could have per formed the like himself! For it is the “force of circumstances” that does everything; the force of one man can do nothing. Now all this is grounded on little more than a metaphor. We figure Society as a “Machine,” and that mind is opposed to mind, as body is to body; whereby two, or at most ten, little minds must be stronger than one great mind. Notable absurdity! For the plain truth, very plain, we think is, that minds are opposed to minds in quite a different way; and one man that has a higher Wisdom, a hitherto unknown spiritual Truth in him, is stronger, not than ten men that have it not, or than ten thousand, but than all men that have it not; and stands among them with a quite ethereal, angelic power, as with a sword out of Heaven's own armory, sky-tempered, which no buckler, and no tower of brass, will finally withstand.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Wisdom , Men , Truth , Angels

“O child! dear child!
Above the clouds I lift my wing
To hear the bells of Heaven ring;
Some of their music, though my flights be wild,
To Earth I bring;
Then let me soar and sing!”

Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833–1908) American poet, critic, and essayist

"The Singer" (1860).

Music , Singing

“The Animals, you say, were "sent"
For man's free use and nutriment.
Pray, then, inform me, and be candid,
Why came they aeons before Man did,
To spend long centuries on earth,
Awaiting their Devourer's birth?
Those ill-timed chattels, sent from Heaven,
Were, sure, the maddest gift e'er given—
"Sent" for Man's usage (can Man believe it?)
When there was no Man to receive it!”

Henry Stephens Salt (1851–1939) British activist

The Sending of the Animals, as quoted in The Savour of Salt: A Henry Salt Anthology, Centaur Press, 1989, p. 55.

Birth , Time , Animals

“And we think that this ultimate blessedness differs only in degree from the happy and joyful experiences of our lives. Whereas the truth is that it differs in kind. The joys, not only of the earth, but of any conceivable heaven - which we can conceive only as some happy and fortunate prolongation of our lives in time - are not of the same order as that ultimate blessedness.”

Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.

p. 7.

Truth , Thinking , Time , Joy

“To be sure, the Bible contains the direct words of God. How do we know? The Moral Majority says so. How do they know? They say they know and to doubt it makes you an agent of the Devil or, worse, a Lbr-l Dm-cr-t. And what does the Bible textbook say? Well, among other things it says the earth was created in 4004 BC (Not actually, but a Moral Majority type figured that out three and a half centuries ago, and his word is also accepted as inspired.) The sun was created three days later. The first male was molded out of dirt, and the first female was molded, some time later, out of his rib. As far as the end of the universe is concerned, the Book of Revelation (6:13-14) says: "And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind." … Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

"The Blind Who Would Lead", essay in The Roving Mind (1983); as quoted in Canadian Atheists Newsletter (1994)
General sources

God , People , Books , School

“Oedipus had already probed his impious eyes with guilty hand and sunk deep his shame condemned to everlasting night; he dragged out his life in a long-drawn death. He devotes himself to darkness, and in the lowest recess of his abode he keeps his home on which the rays of heaven never look; and yet the fierce daylight of his soul flits around him with unflagging wings and the Avengers of his crimes are in his heart.”
Impia jam merita scrutatus lumina dextra merserat aeterna damnatum nocte pudorem Oedipodes longaque animam sub morte trahebat. illum indulgentem tenebris imaeque recessu sedis inaspectos caelo radiisque penates seruantem tamen adsiduis circumuolat alis saeva dies animi, scelerumque in pectore Dirae.

Statius book Thebaid

Source: Thebaid, Book I, Line 46

Life , Death , Home , Soul

“Hey what else can we do now?
Except roll down the window
And let the wind blow back your hair.
Well the night's busting open,
These two lanes will take us anywhere.
We got one last chance to make it real,
To trade in these wings on some wheels.
Climb in back, heaven's waiting on down the tracks.
Oh come take my hand,
We're riding out tonight to case the promised land.
Oh Thunder Road, oh Thunder Road.
Thunder Road.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Thunder Road"
Song lyrics, Born to Run (1975)

Chance , Waiting , Night

“Looking for God—or Heaven—by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

"The Seeing Eye", in Christian Reflections (1967), p. 167

God , Hope , Sense , Reading

“In the heavens, then, there is no chance, irregularity, deviation, or falsity, but on the other hand the utmost order, reality, method, and consistency. The things which are without these qualities, phantasmal, unreal, and erratic, move in and around the earth below the moon, which is the lowest of all the heavenly bodies. Any one, therefore, who thinks that there is no intelligence in the marvellous order of the stars and in their extraordinary regularity, from which the preservation and the entire well-being of all things proceed, ought to be considered destitute of intelligence himself.”
Nulla igitur in caelo nec fortuna nec temeritas nec erratio nec vanitas inest contraque omnis ordo veritas ratio constantia, quaeque his vacant ementita et falsa plenaque erroris, ea circum terras infra lunam, quae omnium ultima est, in terrisque versantur. caelestem ergo admirabilem ordinem incredibilemque constantiam, ex qua conservatio et salus omnium omnis oritur, qui vacare mente putat is ipse mentis expers habendus est.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Book II, section 21
De Natura Deorum – On the Nature of the Gods (45 BC)

Star , Intelligence , Thinking , Reality

“Heaven, in the production of things, is sure to be bountiful to them, according to their qualities. Hence the tree that is flourishing, it nourishes, while that which is ready to fall, it overthrows.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Doctrine of the Mean

Tree

“For we by conquest, of our soveraine might,
And by eternall doome of Fate's decree,
Have wonne the Empire of the Heavens bright.”

Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene

Canto vi, stanza 33
The Faerie Queene (1589–1596), Book VII

Fate

“High above all earthly lower happiness, the blessedness of the eight Beatitudes towers into the heaven itself. They are white with the snows of eternity; they give a space, a meaning, a dignity to all the rest of the earth over which they brood.”

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815–1881) English churchman, Dean of Westminster

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 33.

Happiness

“It was the custom of the Roman emperors, at their triumphal entrance, to cast new coins among the multitudes; so doth Christ, in His triumphal ascension into heaven, throw the greatest gifts for the good of men that were ever given.”

Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680) English clergyman

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 78.

Men , Christ

“Cheeseburger is paradise.
Heaven on earth with an onion slice.
Not too particular, not too precise.
I'm just a cheeseburger in paradise.I like mine with lettuce and tomato,
Heinz Fifty-seven and French fried potatoes.
Big kosher pickle and a cold draft beer.
Well, good God Almighty, which way do I steer?
For my cheeseburger in paradise.”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

Cheeseburger in Paradise
Song lyrics, Son of a Son of a Sailor (1978)

God , Way , Beer

“O Heaven! Today I am sick and tired
Of the colors and forms of this world! …
I close my eyes to disregard the present,
Gradually shifting into the past upon my eyelids.
I close my eyes to let the dark shadows arise boundlessly,
Immense as in the deep of night,
To let my soul grow dark with the artificial,
In the world of the dead so long awaited.
Let the shades of ghosts and demons one by one appear.
Let their cries, their shouts of epilogue, reverberate in my ear.
Let me roll about, my soul intoxicated with illusion,
To put out of mind for a few minutes the scenes of this world!
Let my soul soar rapidly over great distances
In the dark night shadows of my eyelids,
And proudly assert: Here is a world
Created in a moment of grief.”

Chế Lan Viên (1920–1989) Vietnamese writer

"Creation", as quoted in "Shattered Identities and Contested Images: Reflections of Poetry and History in 20th-Century Vietnam" by Neil Jamieson, in Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1992, p. 89, and in Understanding Vietnam by Neil Jamieson (University of California Press, 1995), ISBN 978-0520916586, p. 164

World , Color , Soul , Appearance

“O my Lord, Thy hand holding the sacred drum has made and ordered the heavens and earth and other worlds and innumerable souls. Thy lifted hand protects both the conscious and unconscious order of thy creation. All these worlds are transformed by Thy hand bearing fire. Thy sacred foot, planted on the ground, gives an abode to the tired soul struggling in the toils of causality. It is Thy lifted foot that grants eternal bliss to those that approach Thee. These Five-Actions are indeed Thy Handiwork.”

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877–1947) Ceylon-American art historian

By Ananda Coomaraswamy in "Nataraja".

World , Soul

“A hundred years—in this life span on earth
talent and destiny are apt to feud.
You must go through a play of ebb and flow
and watch such things as make you sick at heart.
Is it so strange that losses balance gains?
Blue Heaven's wont to strike a rose from spite.”

Nguyễn Du The Tale of Kieu

Opening lines
The Tale of Kiều (1813)

Life , Loss , Heart

“Fewer are the ways of helping people than of harming them; it is the nature of things, not a consequence of the statistical method. Our world does not stand halfway between heaven and hell; it seems much closer to hell.”

Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) Polish science fiction author

One Human Minute (1986)

People , World , Way , Hell

“The sweetest teaching did he introduce,
Concealing truth under untrue speech.
The place he spoke of as the gods' abode
Was that by which he might awe humans most, —
The place from which, he knew, terrors came to mortals
And things advantageous in their wearisome life —
The revolving heaven above, in which dwell
The lightnings, and awesome claps
Of thunder, and the starry face of heaven,
Beautiful and intricate by that wise craftsman Time, —
From which, too, the meteor's glowing mass speeds
And wet thunderstorm pours forth upon the earth.”

Euripidés (-480–-406 BC) ancient Athenian playwright

Sisyphus as translated by R. G. Bury, and revised by J. Garrett

Life , God , Truth , Beauty

“The Biblical words about the genesis of heaven and earth are not words of information but words of appreciation. The story of creation is not a description of how the world came into being but a song about the glory of the world's having come into being.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

The Wisdom of Heschel (1970), p. 150

World

“In these three words: It is a Joy, a bliss, an endless satisfying to me, were shewed three heavens, as thus: For the joy, I understood the pleasure of the Father; and for the bliss, the worship of the Son; and for the endless satisfying, the Holy Ghost. The Father is pleased, the Son is worshipped, the Holy Ghost is satisfied.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Ninth Revelation, Chapter 23

Pleasure , Joy

“Tis this which makes
The best assurance of our promised heaven:
This triumph intellect has over death—
Our words yet live on others' lips; our thoughts
Actuate others. Can that man be dead
Whose spiritual influence is upon his kind?”

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

A History of the Lyre
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)

Death , Dead

“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”

Clive Staples Lewis book God in the Dock

"The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" (1949), p. 292
Similar statements were included in "A Reply to Professor Haldane" (1946) (see above), published posthumously.
God in the Dock (1970)

Age , Disease , Exercises , Hell