This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"A guilty conscience is a hell on earth, and points to one beyond." - Francis Beaumont
"Piety and selfless deeds elevate the inhabitants of this earth to exalted spiritual estates... self-serving acts reduce them to the realms beneath, of sorrow and pain, rebirths among birds and vermin, or out of the wombs of pigs and beasts of the wild, or among trees. Action is a function of character, which in turn is controlled by custom. This is the whole substance of the secret. This knowledge is the ferry across the ocean of hell to beatitude. For all the animate and inanimate objects in this world... are transitory, like dream. The gods on high, the mute trees and stones, are but apparitions in the fantasy. Good and evil attaching to a person are perishable as bubbles. In the cycles of time they alternate. The wise are attached to neither." - Brahma-Vaivarta Purana NULL
"The influences of little things are as real, and as constantly about us, as the air we breathe or the light by which we see. These are the small - the often invisible - the almost unthought of strands, which are inweaving and twisting by millions, to bind us to character - to good or evil here, and to heaven or hell hereafter." - Tyron Edwards
"No hell will frighten men away from sin; no dread of prospective misery; only goodness can cast hell out of any man, and set up the kingdom of heaven within." - Hugh Reginald Haweis
"We are saved from nothing if we are not saved from sin. Little sins are pioneers of hell. The backslider begins with what he foolishly considers trifling with little sins. There are no little sins." - Jeremiah Brown Howell
"The human species... capacity for good is infinite, since they can, they desire, make room within themselves for divine Reality. But at the same time their capacity for evil is, not indeed infinite (since evil is always ultimately self-destructive and therefore temporary), but uniquely great. Hell is total separation from God, and the devil is the will to that separation... To be diabolic on the grand scale, one must, like Milton’s Satan, exhibit in a high degree all the moral virtues, except only charity and wisdom." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"Procrastination is the kidnapper of souls and the recruiting-officer of hell." - Edward Irving
"Heaven and hell are states of mind. The kingdom of heaven is within you. You create your own heaven or hell. The anguish of a personal hell can serve to strengthen you if you will let it. Judgment day takes place every moment of your life." - Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla
"Every duty brings its peculiar delight, every denial its appropriate compensation, every thought its recompense, every love its elysium, every cross its crown; pay goes with performance as effect with cause. Meanness overreaches itself; vice vitiates whoever indulges it; the wicked wrong their own souls; generosity greatens; virtue exalts; charity transfigures; and holiness is the essence of angelhood. God does not require us to live on credit; he pays us what we earn as we earn it, good or evil, heaven or hell, according to our choice." - Arundell Charles St. John-Mildmay
"If you do not specify and confront real issues, what you say will surely obscure them. If you do not alarm anyone morally, you yourself remain morally asleep. If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift of the coming hell." - C. Wright Mills, fully Charles Wright Mills
"A man can bear a world’s contempt when he has that within which says he’s worthy. When he contemns himself, there burns the hell." - Alexander Smith
"One need remain in hell no longer than he chooses to; and the moment he chooses not to remain longer, not all the powers in the universe can prevent his leaving it. One can rise to any heaven he himself chooses; and when he chooses so to rise, all the higher powers of the universe combine to help him heavenward." - Ralph Waldo Trine
"Happy the man who has learned the cause of things and has put under his feet all fear, inexorable fate, and the noisy strife of the hell of greed." - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
"Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason, and Energy, Love and hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell." - William Blake
"Every other sin hath some pleasures annexed to it, or will admit of some excuse, but envy wants both. We should strive against it, for if indulged in it will be to us as a foretaste of hell upon earth." - Richard Francis Burton, fully Sir Richard Francis Burton
"The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul." - John Calvin
"Tears never yet saved a soul. Hell is full of weepers weeping over lost opportunities, perhaps over the rejection of an offered Saviour. Your Bible does not say, “Weep, and be saved.” It says, “Believe, and be saved.” Faith is better than feeling." - Theodore Cuyler, fully Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
"Pride the first peer and president of hell." - Daniel Defoe, born Daniel Foe
"What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
"That person lives in hell who gets what he desires too soon. Whether he finds his happiness in wealth, power, fame or women, or in a combination of all, that happiness will be meaningless if it robs him of his desire. Heaven is a country through which we are permitted to search eagerly and with hope for what we want." - Thomas Dreier
"Hell is truth seen too late - duty neglected in its season." - Tyron Edwards
"Doubt is hell in the human soul." - Madame de Gasparin, Valérie Boissier de Gasparin
"There is a truism about manners that can be stated didactically: Each generation believes that the manners of the generation that follows it have gone to hell in a hand basket." - Russell Lynes, fully Joseph Russell Lynes, Jr.
"The smallest atom of truth represents some man’s bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker’s grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
"Hell is the place where the satisfied compare disappointments." - Philip Moeller
"Men are extremely inclined to the passions of hope and fear; a religion, therefore, that had neither a heaven nor a hell could hardly please them." - Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu
"Fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death and the deeds that ye do upon the earth, it is for fellowship's sake that ye do them." - William Morris
"Money is like manure. If you spread it around, it does a lot of good, but if you pile it up in one place, it stinks like hell." - Clint Williams Murchison, Sr.
"The divisions and boundaries that we perceive based upon our five senses are, in effect, an illusion. It’s my belief that the meaning of life changes from day to day, second to second. I believe we’re here to learn that we’re part of a creative force - I would go so far as to call that force divine. We’re here to learn that we can create a world and that we have a choice in what we create, and that our world, if we choose, can be a heaven or hell." - Thomas E. O’Connor
"All the religions known in the world are founded, so far as they relate to man or the unity of man, as being all of one degree. Whether in heaven or in hell, or in whatever state man may be supposed to exist hereafter the good and the bad are the only distinctions." - Thomas Paine
"He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death." - Thomas Paine
"These are the times that try men's souls. The Summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country, but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheaply we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its things; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial article as freedom should not be highly rated." - Thomas Paine
"When thou are obliged to speak, be sure to speak the truth; for equivocation is half-way to lying, and lying is the whole way to hell." - William Penn
"Hell was built on spite, and heav’n on pride." - Alexander Pope
"The white man’s civilization with its inhuman economic competition and rugged individualism has produced millions of physical and mental wrecks. It has produced enough vices to fill Dante’s hell. Nine-tenths of the people who reach forty are suffering from shattered nerves." - Melvin Tolson, fully Melvin Beaunorus Tolson
"You tell us that baptism is absolutely necessary to go to heaven. If there were a man so good that he had never offended God, and if he died without baptism, would he go to hell, never having given any offense to God? If he goes to hell, then God must not love all good people, since He throws one into the fire. You teach us that God existed before the creation of heaven and earth. If He did, where did He live, since there was neither heaven nor earth? You say that the angels were created n the beginning of the world, and that those who disobeyed were cast into hell. How can that be so, since you say the angels sinned before earth’s creation, and hell is in the depths of the earth? You declare that those who go to hell do not come out of it, and yet you relate stories of the damned who have appeared in the world - how is that to be understood. Ah, how I would like to kill devils, since they do so much harm! But if they are made like men and some are even among men, do they still feel the fire of hell? Why is it that they do not repent for having offended God? If they did repent, would not God be merciful to them? If Our Lord has suffered for all sinners, why do not they receive pardon from him? You say that the virgin, mother of Jesus Christ, is not God, and that she has never offended God. You also say that her Son has redeemed all men, and atoned for all; but if she has done nothing wrong, her son could not redeem her nor atone for her." - Young “Savage” Seminarians NULL
"Beware of the man of complete unquestionable virtue, the upstanding self-righteous citizen, who for all creatures of weakness has one general attitude: “Give them hell.”" - David Abrahamsen
"There is such a thing as hell on earth. For the most part, it is populated by people who fear so deeply that they cannot love." - Frank Forrester Church III
"Hell, there are no rules here we're trying to accomplish something." - Thomas Edison, fully Thomas Alva Edison
"Both heaven and hell are within us." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"The truly religious man is always more concerned about what God will do in him that what He will do to him; in this intense desire for purification of his motives he almost wishes that heaven and hell were blotted out, that he might serve God for Himself alone." - William Ralph Inge
"The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil." - William James
"Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living." - Mother Jones, referring to Mary Harris Jones