Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe -- the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

- Immanuel Kant

I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishment after I'm dead.

- Kurt Vonnegut

I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy.

- Thomas Paine

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid.

- Marcus Aurelius

I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God.

- Thomas Alva Edison

I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

- Isaac Asimov

Gentleness and kindness will make our homes a paradise upon earth.

- C. A. Bartol

In heaven all the interesting people are missing.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps,
Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvest reaps.

- Amos Bronson Alcott

I hope you love birds, too. It is economical. It saves going to Heaven.

- Emily Dickinson

We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next.

- Pearl S. Buck

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.

- Pearl S. Buck

We are our own devils; we drive ourselves out of our Edens.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It is worthwhile to live
and fight courageously
for sacred ideals.

- Norbert Capek

Who has not found the heaven below
Will fail of it above.
God's residence is next to mine,
His furniture is love.

- Emily Dickinson

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
And only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

- Elizabeth Barrett Browning



My life closed twice before its close;
????It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
????A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
????As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
????And all we need of hell.

- Emily Dickinson



'Tis vast—as our Capacity—
As fair—as our idea—
To Him of adequate desire
No further 'tis, than Here—

- Emily Dickinson



What is—"Paradise"—
Who live there—
Are they "Farmers"—
Do they "hoe"—
Do they know that this is "Amherst"—
And that I—am coming—too—

- Emily Dickinson



Why—do they shut Me out of Heaven?
Did I sing—too loud?
But—I can say a little "Minor"
Timid as a Bird!

- Emily Dickinson



For everything there is a season,
And a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate,
A time for war, and a time for peace.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

- Ecclesiastes



I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.

- Amy Tan



How you behave toward cats here below determines your status in Heaven.

- Robert Heinlein



In the world to come, I shall not be asked, "Why were you not Moses?" I shall be asked, "Why were you not Zusya?"

- Rabbi Zusya



Love is the only bow on life's dark cloud.
It is the Morning and the Evening Star.
It shines upon the cradle of the babe,
and sheds its radiance upon the quiet tomb.
It is the mother of Art,
inspirer of poet, patriot, and philosopher.
It is the air and light of every heart, builder of every home,
kindler of every fire on every hearth.
It was the first to dream of immortality.
It fills the world with melody,
for Music is the voice of Love.
Love is the magician, the enchanter,
that changes worthless things to joy,
and makes right royal kings and queens of common clay.
It is the perfume of the wondrous flower -- the heart
and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon,
we are less than beasts;
but with it, earth is heaven
and we are gods.

- Robert G. Ingersoll



Heaven, n.: A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own.

The Devil's Dictionary

- Ambrose Bierce



I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it.

- Albert Einstein



Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms.

- Robert G. Ingersoll



Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need of hell.

- Emily Dickinson



The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.

- John Milton



A lawyer's dream of Heaven: Every man reclaimed his own property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.

- Samuel Butler



Travel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to except heaven & hell & I have only a vague curiosity about one of those.

- Mark Twain



Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.

- H. L. Mencken



I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

- Thomas Jefferson



They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses;
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

- Ernest Dowson



The inventor of their heaven empties into it all the nations of the earth, in one common jumble. All are on an equality absolute, no one of them ranking another; they have to be "brothers"; they have to mix together, pray together, harp together, hosannah together--whites, niggers, Jews, everybody--there's no distinction. Here in the earth all nations hate each other, and every one of them hates the Jew. Yet every pious person adores that heaven and wants to get into it. He really does. And when he is in a holy rapture he thinks he thinks that if he were only there he would take all the populace to his heart, and hug, and hug, and hug!

Letters from the Earth

- Mark Twain



Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

- Mark Twain



The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.

- John Milton



Let us swear while we may, for in Heaven it will not be allowed.

- Mark Twain



I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

- Isaac Asimov



But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?

- Robert F. Kennedy



To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson