Popular quotes about Paradise! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
Say what you want about it, Hell is story-friendly... The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It's about what happens when the stories are over.
Charles BaxterThe notion of Victoria should be a ladies' paradise. If men like Victoria's Secret, that's kind of a bonus, but in my imagination they should feel uncomfortable when they're in the store, if there's no mahogany paneling, there's nothing that's welcoming. This is a ladies' paradise. And that thinking goes into the design of the store, the fitting rooms, the fabric, the display. It's all from the lady's point of view. It has nothing to do with men.
Les WexnerAll play aspires to the condition of paradise...through play in all its forms...we hope to achieve a state that our larger Greco-Roman, Judeo- Christian culture has always known was lost. Where it exists, we do not know, although we always have envisioned it as a garden...always as removed, as an enclosed green place...Paradise is an ancient dream...It is a dream of ourselves as better than we are, back to what we were.
A. Bartlett GiamattiAnyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: The criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.
Milan KunderaYou can't live in paradiseโbut you are living right here. Make this your paradise or make this your hell. The choice is entirely yours. Really.
Brad WarnerIf an armed nation were a polite nation, America would be paradise. We have more than 200 million guns in private owernship here. But our manners are not getting better.
Molly IvinsBooks were my window on the world. Growing up at the Elephant and Castle, which was very rough, my paradise was the library.
Michael CaineThe thing that had fueled these utopian communities was a literal belief, and not just a general sense of optimism, that the earth was about to become a paradise. That idea cannot hold water after the war.
Christine JenningsAs he looked up at the clouds or down at the precipice, he realized that this woman was the most important thing in his life; that she was the explanation, the sole reason for the existence of those rocks, that sky, that winter. If she were not there with him, it wouldn't matter if all the angels of heaven came flying down to comfort him--Paradise would make no sense.
Paulo CoelhoI mean only that I hope they find darkness or paradise without fear of it, if they can.
Erin MorgensternTo work with God's happiness bubbling in the soul is to carry a portable paradise within you wherever you go.
Paramahansa YoganandaYou know not, yet, the sort of love that strikes like a lightning bolt; that clutches hold of you by the heart, as irrevocably as death; that becomes the lodestar by which you steer the rest of your life. I would not wish such a love on anyone, man or woman, for it can make your life a paradise, or it can destroy you utterly.
Juliet MarillierWhen man tries to imagine Paradise on earth, the immediate result is a very respectable Hell.
Paul ClaudelThis is the time. This is the place. This is the vastness. Right here is paradise. Always. Always.
Byron KatieA man's physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man's hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will.
C. S. LewisScientific truth is marvelous, but moral truth is divine and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light has found the lost paradise.
Horace MannHow soon the labor of men would make a paradise of the earth were it not for misgovernment and a diversion of his energies to selfish interests.
Thomas JeffersonFaded the flower and all its budded charms,Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise!Vanishd unseasonably
John KeatsThe 'futures' and 'careers' for which American students now prepare are for the most part intellectual and moral wastelands. This chrome-plated consumers' paradise would have us grow up to be well-behaved children. But an important minority of men and women coming to the front today have shown they will die rather than be standardized, replaceable, and irrelevant.
Mario SavioInfancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.
Ralph Waldo EmersonI realized that Eastern thought had somewhat more compassion for all living things. Man was a form of life that in another reincarnation might possibly be a horsefly or a bird of paradise or a deer. So a man of such a faith, looking at animals, might be looking at old friends or ancestors. In the East the wilderness has no evil connotation; it is thought of as an expression of the unity and harmony of the universe.
William O. DouglasOnce [a soul] is condemned by God, then God's friends agree in God's judgment and condemnation. For all eternity they will not have a kind thought for this wretch. Rather they will be satisfied to see him in the flames as a victim of God's justice. ("The just shall rejoice when he shall see the revenge . . ." Psalm 57:11) They will abhor him. A mother will look from paradise upon her own condemned son without being moved, as though she had never known him.
Anthony Mary ClaretAll three of my books, "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora," "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres," and "Birds of Paradise Lost," are immigrant narratives - their dreams, their traumas, their struggles - and I write them with the confidence that these stories, written from the heart, will belong, in time, to America.
Andrew LamSin and death and suffering and war and poverty are not naturalโthey are the devastating results of our rebellion against God. We long for a return to Paradiseโa perfect world, without the corruption of sin, where God walks with us and talks with us in the cool of the day.
Randy AlcornWhere there is the tree of knowledge, there is always Paradise: so say the most ancient and most modern serpents.
Friedrich NietzscheIsn't the first story told in the West about the Fall? Adam and Eve were immigrants too from somewhere, a lost Eden, a paradise lost. We all now are so mobile, so nomadic .
Andrew LamGrowing up in a Jewish matriarchal world inside the patriarchal paradise of Salt Lake City, Utah, gave me increased perspective on gender issues, as it also did my gay brother and my lesbian sister. Our younger sister is the perfect Jewish-American wife and mother, and is fiercely proud of that fact.
Roseanne BarrThe future seems a little gloomy! Go to bed early, sleep well, eat moderately at breakfast; the future looks brighter. The world's outlook may not have changed, but our capacity for dealing with it has. Happiness, or unhappiness, depends to some extent on external conditions, but also, and in most cases chiefly, on our own physical and mental powers. Some people would be discontented in Paradise, others ... are cheerful in a graveyard.
Arthur LynchTerrorism [is] a biological consequence of the multinationals, just as a day of fever is the reasonable price of an effective vaccine . . . The conflict is between great powers, not between demons and heroes. Unhappily, therefore, is the nation that finds the "heroes" underfoot, especially if they still think in religious terms and involve the population in their bloody ascent to an uninhabited paradise.
Umberto EcoIn Paradise there are things which no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no human mind has thought of.
MuhammadRemain tranquil and prepare to bear still greater trials. All is not lost even though you be troubled oftener or tempted more grievously. You are a man, not God. You are flesh, not an angel. How can you possibly expect to remain always in the same state of virtue when the angels in heaven and the first man in paradise failed to do so? I am He who rescues the afflicted and brings to My divinity those who know their own weakness.
Thomas a KempisHumankind is closer to experiencing paradise than ever before. We have the technology to feed every person in the world and the knowledge to provide a means of self-expression, self worth, shelter and more, for all people everywhere if we wish to do so.
Marlo MorganThe sun tells the best joke of a day full of them, setting so spectacularly that you can almost smell the tropical paradise lazing somewhere over this rim of endless, gray socialist towers. Miles of square windows explode orange, red, and purple, like a million TV sets broadcasting the apocalypse. Clouds unspool. The sky drains of birds.
Tod WodickaThe Bible begins gloriously with Paradise, the symbol of youth, and ends with the everlasting kingdom, with the holy city. The history of every man should be a Bible.
NovalisOnly common mortals like the Somervilles have good old rotten hates, dear,' said her mother. 'Sir Graham manages to love everybody and wouldn't know what you're talking about. Have a bun.' 'He doesn't love the Turks,' said Philippa. 'He kills them.' 'That isn't hate,' said Kate Somerville. 'That's simply hoeing among one's principles to keep them healthy and neat. I'm sure he would tell you he bears them no personal grudge; and they think they're going to Paradise anyway, so it does everyone good.
Dorothy DunnettYou can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise.
Terence McKennaThe Earth is beautiful. If you start living its beauty, enjoying its joys with no guilt in your heart, you are in paradise. If you condemn everything, every small joy, then the same Earth turns into a hell. It is a question of your own inner transformation. It is not a change of place, it is a change of inner space. Live joyously, guiltlessly, live totally, live intensely. And then heaven is no more a metaphysical concept, it is your own experience.
RajneeshParadise is not something unique; there are so many paradises in the universe; Earth is one of them!
Mehmet Murat IldanHow soon are we broken on the soft pillow of ease! Adam in paradise was overcome, when Job on the dunghill was a conqueror.
Thomas WatsonThe Revolutionary's Utopia, which in appearance represents a complete break with the past, is always modeled on some image of the Lost Paradise, of a legendary Golden Age... All utopias are fed from the source of mythology; the social engineers' blueprints are merely revised editions of the ancient text.
Arthur Koestler