The vague and tenuous hope that God is too kind to punish the ungodly has become a deadly opiate for the consciences of millions.
—A. W. Tozer (1897–1963) American Christian Pastor, Preacher, Author, Editor
When I go to hell, I mean to carry a bribe: for look you, good gifts evermore make way for the worst persons.
—John Webster (1580–1634) English Dramatist, Poet
When the world dissolves, all places will be hell that are not heaven.
—Christopher Marlowe (1564–93) English Playwright, Poet, Translator
O Lord, wandering with thee, even hell itself would be to me a heaven of bliss.
—The Ramayana Hindu Religious Text
A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.
—John Milton (1608–74) English Poet, Civil Servant, Scholar, Debater
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib’d one self place; for where we are is Hell, and where Hell is, there must we ever be.
—Christopher Marlowe (1564–93) English Playwright, Poet, Translator
Of all the inhabitants of the inferno, none but Lucifer knows that hell is hell, and the secret function of purgatory is to make of heaven an effective reality.
—Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) British Novelist, Playwright, Critic
I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.
—Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91) French Poet, Adventurer
Hell is paved with great granite blocks hewn from the hearts of those who said, “I can do no other.”
—Heywood Broun (1888–1939) American Journalist
Men might go to heaven with half the labor they put forth to go to hell, if they would but venture their industry in the right way.
—Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English Dramatist, Poet, Actor
Tell me not of the fire and the worm, and the blackness and darkness of hell. — To my terrified conscience there is hell enough in this representation of it, that it is the common sewer of all that is abominable and abandoned and reckless as to principle, and depraved as to morals, the one common eddy where all things that are polluted and wretched and filthy are gathered together.
—Francis Beaumont (1584–1616) English Dramatist
Hell is out of fashion — institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one’s own skull. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.
—J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) English Novelist, Short Story Writer
To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be — I hope it is — redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable.
—William Golding (1911–93) English Novelist