Paradise Quotes

We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.

Lionel Trilling

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

Henry David Thoreau

A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.

Ernest Hemingway

It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the Fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation, had said, All right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up. And they did.

Diane Arbus

God hides the fires of hell within paradise.

Paulo Coelho

It is a curious thing that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.

Evelyn Waugh

Hell is when we look back during that fraction of a second and know that we wasted an opportunity to dignify the miracle of life. Paradise is being able to say at that moment: I made some mistakes, but I wasn't a coward. I lived my life and did what I had to do.

Paulo Coelho

I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.

Blaise Pascal

Paradise Lost' is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.

Samuel Johnson

I should have no use for a paradise in which I should be deprived of the right to prefer hell.

Jean Rostand

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

Voltaire

The abominable effort to take one's sins with one to paradise.

Andre Gide

But veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls.

George Eliot

We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.

Simone Weil

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.

Victor Hugo

From the very fountain of enchantment there arises a taste of bitterness to spread anguish amongst the flowers.

Lucretius

A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell!

Thomas Fuller

Ta ta and adios. Or, as Saint Peter said to me with a sly wink, when I told him I was on my last-round trip to Paradise: See you later, Alligator.

Kurt Vonnegut

Paradise is exactly like where you are right now... only much, much better.

Laurie Halse Anderson

Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply. We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?

William Golding