Great Throughts Treasury

"The superior man is quiet and calm, waiting for the appointments of Heaven, while the mean man walks in dangerous paths, looking for lucky occurrences." - Tze-sze NULL

"It is impossible for the will to attain to the sweetness and bliss of the divine union otherwise than in detachment, in refusing to the desire every pleasure in the things of heaven and earth." -

"Do not despise your situation; in it you must act, suffer, and conquer. From every point on earth we are equally near heaven and to the infinite." -

"Music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven." -

"Love lent me wings; my path was like a stair; a lamp unto my feet, that sun was given; and death was safety and great joy to find; but dying now, I shall not climb to Heaven." - Michelangelo, aka Michaelangelo Buonarroti, fully Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni NULL

"Death and love are the two wings that bear the good man to heaven." - Michelangelo, aka Michaelangelo Buonarroti, fully Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni NULL

"There is, they say, (and I believe there is), a spark within us of th’ immortal fire, that animates and moulds the grosser frame; and when the body sinks, escapes to heaven; its native seat, and mixes with the gods." - John Armstrong

"A simple-minded believer would say, ‘God is in Heaven.’ A man of trained mind, knowing that God must be represented as a physical entity in space, would say, ‘God is everywhere, and not merely in Heaven.’ But if the omnipresence of God be taken only in a physical and spatial sense, that formula, too, is likely in error. Accordingly, the philosopher more adequately expresses the purely spiritual nature of God when he asserts that God is nowhere but in Himself; in fact, rather than say that God is in spaced he might more justly say that space and matter are in God." - Averroes, full name ʾAbū l-Walīd Muḥammad bin ʾAḥmad bin Rušd NULL

"He who is loud in his prayers is short in his faith... He who prays must direct his heart to heaven." - Babylonian Talmud

"What a desolate place would be a world without a flower! It would be a face without a smile, a feast without a welcome. Are not flowers the stars of the earth, and are not our stars the flowers of heaven?" - Clara Lucas Balfour

"The proper work of man, the grand drift of human life is to follow reason, that noble spark kindled in us from heaven." - Isaac Barrow

"The greatest attribute of Heaven is mercy." - Beaumont and Fletcher, Francis Beaumont (c.1585-1614) and John Fletcher

"Faith without works is like a bird without wings; though she may hop with her companions on earth, yet she will never fly with them to heaven; but when both are joined together, then doth the soul mount up to her eternal rest." - J. Beaumont

"If the way of heaven be narrow, it is not long; and if the gate be straight, it opens into endless life." - William Beveridge

"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted." - Bible or The Bible or Holy Bible NULL

"Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed and governed their Passions or have no Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings." - William Blake

"To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, to hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour." - William Blake

"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

"Heaven does not make holiness, but holiness makes heaven." - Phillips Brooks

"Heaven is not to sweep our truths away, but only to turn them till we see their glory, to open them till we see their truth, and to unveil our eyes till for the first time we shall really see them." - Phillips Brooks

"Earth's crammed with Heaven and every common bush afire with God. But only he who sees takes off his shoes." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell." -

"To the thinker, the most trifling external object often suggests ideas, which extend, link after link, from earth to heaven." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

"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 - from ignorance, in a word, to knowledge, but knowledge of what order?" - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

"When some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania, when you think, because Heaven has denied you this or that on which you had set your heart, that all your life must be a blank, oh, then diet yourself well on biography - the biography of good and great men." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

"Heaven gives its favorites early death." -

"I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, and receives new truth as an angel for Heaven." - William Ellery Channing

"The mind in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven." - William Ellery Channing

"The man who can really, in living union of the mind and heart, converse with God through nature, finds in the material forms around him, a source of power and happiness inexhaustible, and like the life of angels. The highest life and glory of man is to be alive unto God; and when this grandeur of sensibility to him, and this power of communion with him is carried, as the habit of the soul, into the forms of nature, then the walls of our world are as the gates of heaven." - George Barrell Cheever

"The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground." - G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

"The heart must be at rest before the mind, like a quiet lake under an unclouded summer evening, can reflect the solemn starlight and the splendid mysteries of heaven." - Macdonald Clarke

"Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned." - William Congreve

"Why fear tomorrow, timid heart? Why tread the future's way? We only need to do our part Today, dear child, today. The past is written! Close the book On pages sad and gay; Within the future do not look, But live today-today. "Tis this one hour that God has given; His now we must obey; And it will make our earth his heaven To live today-today." - Lydia Avery Coonley Ward

""Order is Heaven's first law," and a mind without order can by no possibility be either a healthy or a happy mind." - Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, also known as Mulock, Mrs Craik, Mrs Craik, Miss Mulok, Miss Muloch, Miss Mulock

"Religion is the link between soul and body, the point where heaven and earth meet in friendly encounter." -

"All finite things have their roots in the infinite, and if you wish to understand life at all, you cannot tear out its context. And that context, astounding even to bodily eyes, is the heaven of stars and the incredible procession of the great galaxies." - Fitzhugh Dodson

"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

"True happiness is exotic; its birthplace is in heaven; unhappiness is of native growth." - Du Coeur NULL

"Happiness is like manna; it is to be gathered in grains, and enjoyed every day. It will not keep; it cannot be accumulated; nor have we got to go out of ourselves or into remote places to gather it, since it has rained down from a Heaven, at our very door." - Tyron Edwards

"It is not true that there are no enjoyments in the ways of sin; there are, many and various. But the great and radical defect of them all is, that they are transitory and insubstantial, at war with reason and conscience, and always leave a sting behind... They may and often do satisfy us for a moment; but it is death in the end. It is the bread of heaven and the water of life that can so satisfy that we shall hunger no more and thirst no more forever." - Tyron Edwards

"We weep over the graves of infants and the little ones taken from us by death; but an early grave may be the shortest way to heaven." - Tyron Edwards

"True religion is not what men see and admire; it is what God sees and loves... The cheerful consecration of all the powers of the soul; the worship which rising above all outward forms, ascends to God in the sweetest, dearest communion - a worship often too deep for utterance, and than which the highest heaven knows nothing more sublime." - Richard Fuller

"We are in this life as it were in another man's house... In Heaven is our home, in the World is our Inn." - Paul Gerhardt

"Heaven is attracting to itself whatever is congenial to its nature, is enriching itself by the spoils of earth, and collecting within its capacious bosom whatever is pure, permanent and divine." -

"The main objective of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him." - Thomas Hardy

"The intellect of the wise is like glass. It admits the light of heaven and reflects it." - Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare

"Women are the poetry of the world in the same sense as the stars are the poetry of heaven. Clear, light-giving, harmonious, they are the terrestrial planets that rule the destinies of mankind." -

"Divine love is a sacred flower, which in its early bud is happiness, and in its full bloom is heaven." - Eleanor Brown, fully Nora Eleanor Louisa Hervey Brown

"Twin-sister of natural and revealed religion, and of heavenly birth, science will never belie her celestial origin, nor cease to sympathize with all that emanates from the same pure home. Human ignorance and prejudice may for a time seem to have divorced what God has joined together; but human ignorance and prejudice shall at length pass away, and then science and religion shall be seen blending their parti-colored rays into one beautiful bow of light, linking heaven to earth and earth to heaven." - Roswell Dwight Hitchcock

"The sweetest type of heaven is home - nay, heaven is the home for whose acquisition we are to strive the most strongly. Home, in one form and another, is the great object of life. It stands at the end of every day’s labor, and beckons us to its bosom; and life would be cheerless and meaningless, did we not discern across the river that divides us from the life beyond, glimpses of the pleasant mansion prepared for us." -