There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope.
So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! The farce. There is no need for torture: hell is other people.
We will not go to Heaven, Goetz, and even if we both entered it, we would not have eyes to see each other, nor hands to touch each other. Up there, God gets all the attention... We can only love on this earth and against God.
The only paradise is paradise lost.
The idealist is incorrigible. If he is turned out of his heaven, he makes an ideal out of his hell.
If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scoundrel.
From the depths of the gloom wherein you dwell, you do not see much more distinctly than we the radiant and distant portals of Eden. Only, the priests are mistaken. These holy portals are before and not behind us.
For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad.
Expulsion from Paradise is in its main aspect eternal: that is to say, although expulsion from Paradise is final, and life in the world unavoidable, the eternity of the process (or, expressed in temporal terms, the eternal repetition of the process) nevertheless makes it possible not only that we might remain in Paradise permanently, but that we may in fact be there permanently, no matter whether we know it here or not.
Hell is other people.