quotations about Hell
The extreme horribleness of hell, as portrayed by priests and nuns, is inflated to compensate for its implausibility. If hell were plausible, it would only have to be moderately unpleasant in order to deter. Given that it is so unlikely to be true, it has to be advertised as very very scary indeed.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God Delusion
In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: What are you asking God to do? To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.
C. S. LEWIS
The Problem of Pain
The only reason people go to bars is to get drunk and have sex. To me, bars are what hell is like.
CLAY AIKEN
Learning to Sing: Hearing the Music in Your Life
You might be wondering--the hard-men among you, the nutters, the glassers, the thugs--whether you couldn't hack it in Hell, whether you couldn't, when it came right down to it, just butch the bastard out. Well guess what: You couldn't.
GLEN DUNCAN
I
This was hell then; it wasn't anything to worry about: it was just his own familiar room.
GRAHAM GREENE
Brighton Rock
Forever, we hear of hell. During the Middle Ages, people had nightmares that were filled with visions of it. They feared hell. Talk of hell went in and out of fashion. As the Catholic Church's power broke with the Protestant divisions, hell and its clost friends of spiritualism and witchcraft gained tenuous hold. Enlightenment eroded hell's horrors and civilization learned tolerance for the Underworld. Today we believe in hell, but we don't want to believe it could be waiting for us. Hell is cold. It is lonely. It is filled with the dispossessed, the bad, the ugly, and the things about which we choose not to remember. Hell is a leftover idea from our past that we could best do without. The problem is that it will not do without us.
S. KAYE SAUNDERS
Hell Exposed
Canst thou fly too fast from hell and damnation? Canst thou be too carefull to avoid those paths, which, though strewed with roses, lead down to the chambers of death? Whether is it better thy flesh should murmur, or thy soul should perish? O that knowing these terrors of the Lord, our whole life might be one constant flight from the wrath that is to come!
WILLIAM MCEWEN
"On the Misery of the Damned", Select Essays Doctrinal & Practical on a Variety of the Most Important and Interesting Subjects in Divinity
Hell is separated from heaven; for all who are in hell, when they lived in the world, were in the mere delights of the body and the flesh from the love of self and the world; but all who are in heaven, when they lived in the world, were in the delights of the soul and the spirit from love to the Lord and love toward the neighbor. Because these loves are opposite, therefore the heavens and the hells are so entirely separated, that a spirit who is in hell dares not raise the crown of his head, or even put forth a finger thence; for the moment he attempts it, he is racked and tortured.
EMANUEL SWEDENBORG
Heaven and its Wonders and Hell
Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.
JAMES JOYCE
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity.
WILLIAM BLAKE
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Let me say to you here very clearly: it is my firm opinion, and it is my foremost conviction, and it is what I fervently preach, that HELL IS HOT.
SHELTON L. SMITH
Hell is for Real!
Maybe that's what Hell is. You go mad. And all your demons come and get you just as fast as you can think them up.
ANNE RICE
Memnoch the Devil
The Justice of God demands there be an everlasting hell, both as a punishment for the wicked and as a deterrent against those contemplating wickedness.
DAVID MICHAEL LINDSEY
The Woman and the Dragon
Hell's my wife's home town.
BOB DYLAN
"My Wife's Home Town"
All right, God, send me to hell. You think You're frightening me with Your hell, don't You? You think Your hell is worse than mine.
DOROTHY PARKER
"A Telephone Call"
Hell doesn't make God less loving. It reveals the depth of his love, which went to hell and back for us.
PHIL MOORE
Straight to the Heart of Matthew
If hell has no answer for the questioning dead, it is not because it refuses to answer (for rigorous, alas, in observance, is the imperishable fire), but it is because hell has nothing to say, will say nothing eternally.
GEORGES BERNANOS
Joy