Great Throughts Treasury

"An honest man feels that he must pay heaven for every hour of happiness with a good spell of hard unselfish work to make others happy. We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it." - George Bernard Shaw

"To be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer." - George Bernard Shaw

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

"He that cannot forgive others, breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass if he would ever reach heaven; for everyone has need to be forgiven." - George Herbert

"Heaven is to be at peace with things." - George Santayana

"Four things a man must learn to do if he would make his record true; to think without confusion clearly; to love his fellow-men sincerely; to act from honest motives purely; to trust in God and Heaven securely." - Henry Van Dyke

"Prayer is the world in tune, a spirit-voice, and vocal joys, whose echo is heaven’s bliss." - Henry Vaughan

"What seem to us but dim funereal tapers, may be heaven's distant lamps." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"We see dimly through the mists and vapors; amid these earthly damps what seem to us but sad, funeral tapers may be heaven’s distant lamps. There is no Death! What seems so is transition; this life of mortal breath is but a suburb of the life Elysian, whose portal we call Death." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Every fresh act of benevolence is the herald of deeper satisfaction; every charitable act a stepping-stone towards heaven." - Henry Ward Beecher

"Heaven will be inherited by every man who has heaven in his soul." - Henry Ward Beecher

"Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven. By these tendrils we clasp it and climb thitherward. And why do we think that we are separated from them? We never half knew them, nor in this world could." - Henry Ward Beecher

"Every charitable act is a stepping stone towards heaven." - Henry Ward Beecher

"God washes the eyes by tears until they can behold the invisible land where tears shall come no more. O love! O affliction! ye are the guides that show us the way through the great airy space where our loved ones walked; and, as hounds easily follow the scent before the dew be risen, so God teaches us, while yet our sorrow is wet, to follow on and find our dear ones in heaven." - Henry Ward Beecher

"Of all earthly music, that which reaches the farthest into heaven is the beating of a loving heart." - Henry Ward Beecher

"So it is that men sigh on, not knowing what the soul wants, but only that it needs something. Our yearnings are homesickness for heaven. Our sighings are sighings for God, just as children that cry themselves asleep away from home, and sob in their slumber, not knowing that they sob for their parents. The soul's inarticulate moanings are the affections yearning for the Infinite, and having no one to tell them what it is that ails them." - Henry Ward Beecher

"Tears are often the telescope through which men see far into heaven." - Henry Ward Beecher

"When flowers are full of heaven descended dews, they always hang their heads; but men hold theirs the higher the more they receive, getting proud as they get full." - Henry Ward Beecher

"Between the humble and contrite heart and the majesty of heaven there are no barriers; the only password is prayer." - Hosea Ballou

"If gratitude is due from children to their earthly parent, how much more is the gratitude of the great family of men due to our Father in heaven." - Hosea Ballou

"The law of heaven is love." - Hosea Ballou

"There is not a tree in heaven higher than the tree of patience." - Irish Proverbs

"God has two dwellings: one in Heaven, and the other in a meek and thankful heart." - Izaak Walton

"There are two things that declare, as with a voice from heaven, that he that fills that eternal throne must be on the side of virtue, and that which he befriends must finally prosper and prevail. The first is that the bad are never completely happy and at ease, although possessed of everything that this world can bestow; and that the good are never completely miserable, although deprived of everything that this world can take away. The second is that we are so framed and constituted that the most vicious cannot but pay a secret though unwilling homage to virtue, inasmuch as the worst men cannot bring themselves thoroughly to esteem a bad man, although he may be their dearest friend, nor can they thoroughly despise a good man, although he may be their bitterest enemy." - James Bryant Conant

"Keep the home near heaven. Let it face toward the Father’s house. Not only let the day begin and end with God, with mercies acknowledged and forgiveness sought, but let it be seen and felt that God is your chiefest joy, His will in all you do the absolute and sufficient reason." - James Hamilton

"A just security to property is not afforded by that government under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species; where arbitrary tax invade the domestic sanctuaries of the rich and excessive taxes grind the faces of the poor; where the keenness and competitions of want are deemed an insufficient spur to labor, and taxes are again applied by an unfeeling policy as another spur; in violation of that sacred property which heaven, in decreeing man to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, kindly reserved to him in the small repose that could be spared from the supply of his necessities." - James Madison

"Faith is the flame that lifts the sacrifice to heaven." - James Montgomery

"One of the hardest lessons we have to learn in this life and one that many persons never learn, is to see the divine, the celestial, the pure, in the common, the near at hand - to see that heaven lies about us here in this world." - John Burroughs

"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven." - John Milton

"The Divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven, and settling the foundation of the earth." - John Ruskin

"Knowledge is the key that first opens the hard heart, enlarges the affections, and opens the way for men into the kingdom of heaven." - Jonathan Edwards

"‘Tis the divinity that stirs within us; ‘tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter, and intimates eternity to man." - Joseph Addison

"In short, heaven is not to be looked upon only as the reward, but as the natural effect, of a religious life." - Joseph Addison

"This longing after immortality? Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror, of falling into nought? Why shrinks the soul back on herself, and startles at destruction. ‘Tis the divinity that stirs within us; ‘tis heaven itself, that points out an hereafter, and intimates eternity to man." - Joseph Addison

"'Tis the divinity that stirs within us; 'tis heaven itself that points out an hereafter, and intimates eternity to man. Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought!" - Joseph Addison

"`Tis the divinity that stirs within us; `tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter, and intimates eternity to man. Eternity! Thou pleasing, dreadful thought!" - Joseph Addison

"Music is the greatest good that mortals know, and all of heaven we have below." - Joseph Addison

"Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us." - Joseph Campbell

"[Heaven is] that moment in which something attains its maximum depth, its maximum reach, its maximum sense, and becomes completely uninteresting." - Julio Cortázar

"Silence illuminates our souls, whispers to our hearts, and brings them together. Silence separates us from ourselves, makes us sail the firmament of spirit, and brings us closer to Heaven; it makes us feel that bodies are no more than prisons and that this world is only a place of exile." - Kahlil Gibran

"There is something greater and purer than what the mouth utters. Silence illuminates our souls, whispers to our hearts, and brings them together. Silence separates us from ourselves, makes us sail the firmament of spirit, and brings us closer to Heaven; it makes us feel that bodies are no more than prisons and that this world is only a place of exile." - Kahlil Gibran

"Vain are the beliefs and teachings that make man miserable, and false is the good ness that leads him into sorrow and despair, for it is man's purpose to be happy on this earth and lead the way to felicity and preach its gospel wherever he goes. He who does not see the kingdom of heaven in this life will never see it in the coming life. We came not into this life by exile, but we came as innocent creatures of God, to learn how to worship the holy and eternal spirit and seek the hidden secrets within ourselves from the beauty of life." - Kahlil Gibran

"Physics has discovered the edge of infinity; the wisdom of the ages takes us across the border, which is nowhere but in us. When each person rejoins the stream of evolution that upholds the galaxies ands sweeps life forward on the wave of eternity, human existence will cease to contain any suffering, and our real purpose in living - to create heaven on earth - will be realized." - Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, born Mahesh Prasad Varma

"It is the “where I am” that makes heaven. The life after death might become through its very endlessness a burden to our spirits, if it were not to be filled wit the infinite variety and freshness of God’s love. Some have shrunk from its very infinitude, because they have not realized what God’s love can make of it. Human love helps us to understand this. When we have come to love any one with all our power of affection, then there is no monotony or weariness in the days and hours we spend with them." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock

"Salvation is not putting a man into Heaven, but putting Heaven into a man." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock

"A man would have no pleasures in discovering all the beauties of the universe, even in heaven itself, unless he had a partner to whom he might communicate his joys." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

"The meaning of life is that we love one another. The purpose of our lives, it seems to me, is to learn how to do that, so we can create a world where everyone’s in love with everyone all the time. That would be Heaven on earth." - Marianne Williamson

"In the Kingdom of Heaven all is in all, all is one, and all is ours." - Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim

"Sincerity is the way of heaven; to think how to be sincere is the way of man." - Mencius, born Meng Ke or Ko NULL

"Love is the high nobility of heaven, the peaceful home of man. To lack love, when nothing hinders us, is to lack wisdom." - Mencius, born Meng Ke or Ko NULL