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70 observations about Heaven
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Published Sunday, April 20, 2014 @ 12:04 AM EDT
Apr 20 2014


(by Charles Barsotti in the New Yorker)

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
-H.L. Mencken

At an early age I decided that living a life of pious misery in the hope of going to heaven when it's over is a lot like keeping your eyes shut all through a movie in the hope of getting your money back at the end.
-A. Whitney Brown

Better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven.
-John Milton

By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell- and hell heaven. The greater the lie, the more readily it will be believed.
-Adolf Hitler

Clergyman: a ticket speculator outside the gates of heaven.
-H.L. Mencken

Do not ask God the way to heaven; he will show you the hardest way.
-Stanislaw J. Lec

Either heaven or hell will have continuous background music. Which one you think it will be tells a lot about you.
-Bill Vaughan

Even a band of angels can turn ugly and start looting if enough angels are unemployed and hanging around the Pearly Gates convinced that all the succubi own all the liquor stores in Heaven.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Every man is as Heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.
-Miguel de Cervantes

Every politician we have, liberal or conservative, who gets caught drinking or chasing women is thrown out of office. It's backwards. It's more dangerous to have a clean-living President with his finger on the button. He thinks he's going right to heaven. You want to feel safe with a leader? Give me a guy who fights in bars and cheats on his wife. This is a man who wants to put off Judgment Day as long as possible.
-Larry Miller

God will prepare everything for our perfect happiness in heaven, and if it takes my dog being there, I believe he'll be there.
-Rev. Billy Graham

Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.
-Helen Gurley Brown

Heaven and hell suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad. But the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.
-David Hume

Heaven for climate, hell for society.
-Mark Twain

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.
-Mark Twain

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
-William Congreve

Heaven have mercy on us all- Presbyterians and Pagans alike- for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.
-Herman Melville

Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.
-Edward Abbey

Heaven is like Scotland without the midges... and the Scots, of course.
-From Old Harry's Game, BBC Radio

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
-Henry David Thoreau

Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy.
-William Wordsworth

Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground.
-Dante Alighieri

Heaven-A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own.
-Ambrose Bierce

Hell is in Heaven and Heaven is in Hell. But angels see only the light, and devils only the darkness.
-Jacob Boehme

How you behave toward cats here below determines your status in Heaven.
-Robert A. Heinlein

How you gonna go to heaven unless you've danced in hell? I mean how are you gonna know it? How you gonna feel good unless you feel bad?
-Charles Manson

I desire to go to Hell, not to Heaven. In Hell I shall enjoy the company of popes, kings and princes, but in Heaven are only beggars, monks, hermits and apostles.
-Niccolò Machiavelli

I do not see in religion the mystery of the incarnation so much as the mystery of the social order. It introduces into the thought of heaven an idea of equalization, which saves the rich from being massacred by the poor.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell- you see, I have friends in both places.
-Mark Twain

I find that the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it- but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

I have faith in the universe, for it is rational. Law underlies each happening. And I have faith in my purpose here on earth. I have faith in my intuition, the language of my conscience, but I have no faith in speculation about Heaven and Hell. I'm concerned with this time- here and now.
-Albert Einstein

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
-James Thurber

If there are no dogs in heaven, when I die I want to go where they go.
-Will Rogers

In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
-George Bernard Shaw

It is quite useless knocking at the door of heaven for earthly comfort; it's not the sort of comfort they supply there.
-C.S. Lewis

It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in; aim at earth and you will get neither.
-C.S. Lewis

Life moves very fast. It rushes from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds.
-Paulo Coelho

Men, at most, differ as heaven and earth; But women, worst and best, as heaven and hell.
-Alfred Lord Tennyson

No one wants to die. Even people who wanna go to heaven don't wanna die to get there.
-Steve Jobs

Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.
-G.C. Lichtenberg

On earth there is no heaven, but there are pieces of it.
-Jules Renard

Order is heaven's first law.
-Alexander Pope

People with too much heaven in them are hell to live with.
-Tony Larsen

Posterity! you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.
-John Adams

Retire when the work is done. This is the way of heaven.
-Tao Te Ching

Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

So trust is not a matter of probabilities. Statistics can't handle a sample of one. Trust is an act of faith. Trust is the gateway to either heaven or hell-and the gate is unmarked. Damn few have gone through.
-Donald Kingsbury

Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
-H.L. Mencken

Surely happiness is reflective, like the light of heaven; and every countenance bright with smiles, and glowing with innocent enjoyment, is a mirror transmitting to others the rays of a supreme and ever-shining benevolence.
-Washington Irving

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.
-John Updike

The bottom line is in heaven.
-Edwin H. Land

The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man's.
-Mark Twain

The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.
-Evelyn Waugh

The intellect of the wise is like glass; it admits the light of heaven and reflects it.
-Augustus William Hare

The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to Heaven, not how Heaven goes.
-Cesare Baronio

The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven.
-John Milton

The only place different social types can genuinely get along with each other is in heaven.
-Daniel Waters (from the film Heathers)

The outside world doesn't have a lot to offer. You have to make your own heaven in your own home.
-Bette Midler

The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
-Mark Twain

The two universal languages on earth are music and silence. They are also the two primary languages of heaven.
-Peter Kreeft

There are depths in man that go to the lowest hell, and heights that reach the highest heaven, for are not both heaven and hell made out of him, everlasting miracle and mystery that he is.
-Thomas Carlyle

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

To scale great heights, we must come out of the lowest depths. The way to heaven is through hell.
-Herman Melville

Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.
-Arthur Miller

We are satisfied that there can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.
-George Eliot

What a man misses mostly in heaven is company.
-Mark Twain

When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.
-Joseph Heller

You have to go on and be crazy. Craziness is like heaven.
-Jimi Hendrix

You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.
-Robert Louis Stevenson


Categories: Heaven, Quotes on a topic


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