quotations about Heaven
Ascensions into heaven are like falling leaves
sad and happy all at the same time
Going away isn't really sad
especially when your going
enables a new kind of presence
to be born.
MACRINA WIEDERKEHR
Seasons of Your Heart
Heaven is the day of which grace is the dawn; the rich, ripe fruit of which grace is the lovely flower; the inner shrine of that most glorious temple to which grace forms the approach and outer court.
THOMAS GUTHRIE
Christ and the Inheritance of the Saints
O the novelty, the beauty, the grandeur of the heaven of heavens, the house not made with hands, the city that hath foundations infinitely surpassing the temple of Solomon, and the city of David! Beautiful was the earthly paradise, and beautiful the earthly Canaan; yea, beautiful is this habitable earth, where many of the enemies of God reside. What then must be the heavenly paradise, the heavenly Canaan, which God hath prepared for them that love him!
WILLIAM MCEWEN
"On the Happiness of Heaven", Select Essays Doctrinal & Practical on a Variety of the Most Important and Interesting Subjects in Divinity
Heaven and Hell are man's hopes and his fears extended beyond the grave.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
What, after all, is Heaven but a transition, from dim guesses and blind struggling with a mysterious and adverse fate, to the fullness of all wisdom.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
The Student: A Series of Papers
Heaven will be inherited by every man who has heaven in his soul.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
I dare not think that any supercelestial heaven, or whatsoever else ... was increate and eternal. And as for the place of God before the world created, the finite wisdom of mortal men hath no perception of it; neither can it limit the seat of infinite power, no more than infinite power itself can be limited; for his place is in himself, whom no magnitude else can contain.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
The First Part of the History of the World: Intreating of the Beginning and First Ages of the Same
It is possible that the distance of heaven lies wholly in the veil of flesh, which we now want power to penetrate. A new sense, a new eye, might show the spiritual world compassing us on every side.
WILLIAM E. CHANNING
Thoughts
We speak of Paradise, and we speak of Heaven. At times they seem far off and distant to us. But there is no need for us to change our place, or even planet, in order to enter on these regions. We only need that, when we put off these our bodies, we put off also our present limitations; and thus, in accordance which He has apportioned for us, we enter on those good things He "hath prepared."
ARTHUR FOLEY WINNINGTON-INGRAM
"The Shadow of Heaven", Thoughts on Love and Death
Aim at heaven and you will get earth "thrown in": aim at earth and you will get neither.
C. S. LEWIS
Mere Christianity
Jesus knew -- knew -- that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? You have to be a son of God to know that kind of stuff.
J. D. SALINGER
Zooey
To emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on heaven is to create hell.
TOM ROBBINS
Skinny Legs and All
The way of Heaven and Earth may be completely declared in one sentence: They are without any doubleness, and so they produce things in a manner that is unfathomable.
CONFUCIUS
The Doctrine of the Mean
Seeking Heaven through righteousness is not seeking righteousness, but something else;--it is not loving goodness for goodness' sake, but for its rewards.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Amid the discords of this life, it is blessed to think of heaven, where God draws after him an everlasting train of music; for all thoughts are harmonious and all feelings vocal, and so there is round about his feet eternal melody.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Heaven for climate, and hell for society.
MARK TWAIN
speech to the Acorn Society, 1901
Heaven is homelike, we are told,
To beggars as to kings;
And resurrection is a fashion
Antedating wings.
NELLIE SEELYE EVANS
"Equality"
What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Damned
S'pose Heaven's not like a painting that's just hanging there for ever, but more like ... Like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you're alive, from passing cars, or ... upstairs windows when you're lost ...
DAVID MITCHELL
The Bone Clocks
You will say, how can one reach heaven to lay anything there? I will ask you also another question. How can a man being in France reach into England to lay anything there? By exchange.... You know that to avoid the danger of pirates and the inconvenience of foreign coin not current at home, it is the use of merchants to pay it there, to receive it here. Such a thing is there in this "laying up." We are here as strangers; the place where we wish ourselves is our country, even paradise--if so be we send our carriage thither before; if not, I fear we intend some other place, it is not our country.
LANCELOT ANDREWES
Ninety-six Sermons