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Hell is an afterlife concept found in many religions or spiritual philosophies. In many religions, Hell is where sinners spend eternity in the afterlife.

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  • Tros Anchisiade, facilis descensus Auerno:
    Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
    Sed reuocare gradum superasque euadere ad auras,
    Hoc opus, hic labor est. Pauci, quos aequus amauit.
    • It is easy to go down to hell; Night and Day the Gates of Dark Death stand wide; But to climb back up again, to retrace ones steps to the open air, there lies the problem, the difficult task.
    • Virgil, The Aeneid, Book VI

  • Quisque suos patimur manis.
    • Each of us bears his own Hell.
    • Virgil, The Aeneid, Book VI, 743

  • Now the devil that told me I did well
    Says that this deed is chronicled in hell.


  • Just as seeing Heaven's light gave him an awareness of God's presence in all things in the mortal plane, so it has made him aware of God's absence in all things in Hell.
    • Ted Chiang, "Hell Is the Absence of God", in Starlight 3, 2001.

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).
  • What will you do in a world where the Holy Spirit never strives; where every soul is fully left to its own depravity; and where there is no leisure for repentance, if there were even the desire, but where there is too much present pain to admit repentance; where they gnaw their tongues with pain, and blaspheme the God of heaven?

  • An immortality of pain and tears; an infinity of wretchedness and despair; the blackness of darkness across which conscience will forever shoot her clear and ghastly flashes, —like lightning streaming over a desert when midnight and tempest are there; weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth; long, long eternity, and things that will make eternity seem longer,— making each moment seem eternity,— oh, miserable condition of the damned!

  • The Lamb is, indeed, the emblem of love; but what so terrible as the wrath of the Lamb? The depth of the mercy despised is the measure of the punishment of him that despiseth. No more fearful words than those of the Saviour. The threat- enings of the law were temporal, those of the gospel are eternal. It is Christ who reveals the never-dying worm, the unquenchable fire, and He who contrasts with the eternal joys of the redeemed the everlasting woes of the lost. His loving arms would enfold the whole human race, but not while impenitent or unbelieving; the benefits of His redemption are conditional.

  • Many might go to heaven with half the labor they go to hell, if they would venture their industry the right way.

  • The longer men sin, the more easily they can; for every act of transgression weakens conscience, stupefies intellect, hardens hearts, adds force to bad habits, and takes force from good example. And, surely, there is nothing in such associations; as wicked affinities will insure to the sinner in the future state, to incline him to repentance.

  • The mind is its own place, and in itself
    Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

Unsourced

  • Hell is an eternity spent with your friends.
    • Unknown
  • A clergyman earns his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell.
    • H.L. Mencken

  • A civilized society looks with horror upon the abuse and torture of children or adults. Even where capital punishment is practiced, the aim is to implement it as mercifully as possible. Are we to believe then that a holy God - our heavenly Father - is less just than the courts of men?
    • Sidney Hatch

  • A man cannot be happy who believes in hell, any more than he can sweeten his coffee with a pickle.

  • According to Christianity, eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God's infinite love. That's the message we're brought up with: believe or die. "Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options."

  • Again I ask whence it happened that the fall of Adam involved, without remedy, in eternal death so many nations, together with their infant children, except because it so seemed good to God? A decree horrible, I confess, and yet true.

  • Ah! I have lost my freedom, and hell is now beginning.

  • All the meanness, all the revenge, all the selfishness, all the cruelty, all the hatred, all the infamy of which the heart of man is capable, grew, blossomed and bore fruit in this one word, Hell.

  • An idea, which has terrified millions, claims that some of us will go to a place called Hell, where we will suffer eternal torture. This does not scare me because, when I try to imagine a Mind behind this universe, I cannot conceive that Mind, usually called "God," as totally mad. I mean, guys, compare that "God" with the worst monsters you can think of - Adolph Hitler, Joe Stalin, that sort of guy. None of them ever inflicted more than finite pain on their victims. Even de Sade, in his sado-masochistic fantasy novels, never devised an unlimited torture. The idea that the Mind of Creation (if such exists) wants to torture some of its critters for endless infinities of infinities seems too absurd to take seriously. Such a deranged Mind could not create a mud hut, much less the exquisitely mathematical universe around us.

  • And yet this same Deity says to me, "resist not evil; pray for those that despitefully use you; love your enemies, but I will eternally damn mine." It seems to me that even gods should practice what they preach.

  • As a tot I was given the usual terrifying mixed message:
    a) God is love; and
    b) If you don't believe how much he loves you, you will stand in the corner for eternity.



  • Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?"
    Priest: "No, not if you did not know."
    Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"

  • Father of Mercies! Why from silent earth didst thou awake and curse me into birth, tear me from quiet, banish me from night, and make a thankless present of thy light, push into being a reverse of thee and animate a clod with misery?

  • For a plot hatched in hell, don't expect angels for witnesses.
    • Attorney Robert Perry, making summation to trial of John DeLorean

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

  • God cannot send to eternal pain a man who has done something toward improving the condition of his fellow-man. If he can, I had rather go to hell than to heaven and keep company with such a god.

  • God is dead and no one cares. If there is a hell, I'll see you there.

  • God says do what you wish, but make the wrong choice and you will be tortured for eternity in hell. That sir, is not free will. It would be akin to a man telling his girlfriend, do what you wish, but if you choose to leave me, I will track you down and blow your brains out. When a man says this we call him a psychopath and cry out for his imprisonment/execution. When god says the same we call him "loving" and build churches in his honor.
    • William C. Easttom II

  • God so loved the world that he made up his mind to damn a large majority of the human race.

  • Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned
    • often quoted as: "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned"
    • William Congreve, The Mourning Bride


  • Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your Deity made you in his own image, I reply that he must have been very ugly.

  • Hell is where cowards have sent heroes.

  • Hell is sin fully developed, —a man’s own soul permitted to go to extreme limits with that which it now carries out in a mitigated form, and so, becoming like a furnace heated seven times hotter than usual, tormenting itself beyond all power of imagination.

  • Hell: A cooking stove which heats the sacerdotal sauce-pan here below. It was founded on behalf of our priests, to the end that the latter may never be wanting in good cheer.




  • How anyone can believe in eternal punishment, or in any soul which God has made being "lost" and also believes in the love, nay, even in the justice of God is a mystery indeed.
    • C.G. Montefiore

  • I am not afraid of any god in the universe who would send me or any other man or woman to hell. If there were such a being, he would not be a god; he would be a devil.

  • I am the way into the city of woe,

I am the way to a forsaken people,
I am the way into eternal sorrow.
Sacred justice moved my architecture,
I was raised here by
Divine omnipotence,
Primordial love,
And ultimate intellect.
Only those elements time cannot wear were made before me,
And beyond time I stand.
Abandon all hope ye who enter here.
  • I cannot help thinking that the menace of Hell makes as many devils as the severe penal codes of inhuman humanity make villains.
    • Lord Byron

  • I care little in the existence of a heaven or hell; self respect does not allow me to guide my acts with an eye toward heavenly salvation or hellish punishment. All our acts should originate from the spring of unselfish love, whether there be a continuation after death or not.
    • Heinrich Hein

  • I died in Hell - (They called it Passchendaele).

  • I do not consider it a sign of divine love to consign to hell people who live good lives but make an honest mistake in belief.
    • Moshe Shulman

  • I have lately taken to read the New Testament which I assure you is a very good book; but there is one article to which I cannot accede; it is that of the eternity of punishment. I cannot comprehend how this eternity is compatible with the goodness of God!
    • La Fontaine (1621-1695)

  • I know it isn't the fetus's fault, but the mother shouldn't have had an abortion if she didn't want the baby to go to hell.
    • Jim Staal, net.fundie.idiot


  • I read in the Gospels that Jesus forgave the men who nailed him to the cross. He even promised "this day you shall be with me in paradise" to a thief crucified next to him - a thief who addressed Jesus simply as a "man" rather than as "the son of God." Yet, today, this same Jesus cannot forgive my kindly old aunt and allow her to dwell in paradise, simply because her "beliefs" do not match Reverend So-and-So's?
    • Arthur Silver

  • I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.

  • I would not for my life destroy one star of human hope, but I want it so that when a poor woman rocks the cradle and sings a lullaby to the dimpled darling, she will not be compelled to believe that ninety-nine chances in a hundred she is raising kindling wood for hell.

  • If I cannot prevail upon heaven, I shall move hell.
    • Virgil (spoken by Juno in The Aeneid)

  • If the fundamentalists are right, then all the cool people are in Hell!
    • Jeffery Jay Lowder

  • If thinking freely for yourself is a sure ticket to hell, then the conversations in heaven must be awfully boring.
    • Dr. Weirde

  • If you love your neighbors as yourself, yes, even if you have just a little bit of human love and are not solely a selfish wretch, how could you have a single happy moment in heaven, knowing that contemporaneously with your blessed estate continues the endless torment and agony of innumerable millions of the accursed?
    • John Persone, Swedish Lutheran Bishop

  • If you're going to go through hell... I suggest you come back learning something.

  • I'm not a bad guy! I work hard, and I love my kids. So why should I spend half my Sunday hearing about how I'm going to Hell?
    • Homer Simpson, The Simpsons

  • It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio.

  • It serves no purpose to man if there is no room for repentance, and he who is tormented can never grow better.
    • Thomas Burnet, "A Treatise Concerning the State of Departed Souls"

  • If you're going through hell... keep going!

  • Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us, Above us, only sky.

  • It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the one common denominator of mankind.

  • Kill them all. God will select those who should go to heaven and those who should go to hell.
    • Abbot Arnold de Citeaux, 1205

  • L'enfer, c'est les autres.

  • ...little children who have begun to live in their mothers' womb and have there died, or who, having just been born, have passed away from the world without the sacrament of holy baptism... must be punished by the eternal torture of undying fire.
    • Hell, A Christian Doctrine

  • Nothing could add to the horror of hell, except the presence of its creator, God. While I have life, as long as I draw breath, I shall deny with all my strength, and hate with every drop of my blood, this infinite lie.

  • Oh, threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!
    One thing at least is certain: This life flies.
    One thing is certain and the rest is lies;
    the flower that once has blown forever dies.

  • One of the things that most pains and torments these Japanese is that we teach them that the prison of hell is irrevocably shut. For they grieve over the fate of their departed children, of their parents and relatives; and they often show their grief by their tears. So they ask us if there is any hope... .and I am obliged to answer that there is absolutely none. The grief at this affects and torments them wonderfully; they almost pine away with sorrow... .I can hardly restrain my tears sometimes at seeing many so dear to my heart suffer such intense pain about a thing which is already done with and can never be undone.
    • St. Francis Xavier, a Roman Catholic missionary to Japan, 1552


  • Punishments of unreasonable severity, especially where indiscriminately afflicted, have less effect in preventing crimes, and amending the manners of a people, than such as are more merciful in general, yet properly intermixed with due distinctions of severity.
    • William Blackstone, on whether the doctrine of Hell was an effective deterrent to crime, 1769

  • So behold here the triumph: God's wisdom has won. Behold here the damage that can't be undone. Stagnation is good, and we're good to the core, while faith rots us like salt rots the land. If your god helps the helpless, may he help you all well. I'm bound for the outside to find my own hell. If defiance means death, I would die before stand like a sheep to be thrown to God's hand.

  • So revolting to my moral nature is the creed of eternal punishment that it, more than any other cause, produces the most widespread unbelief. Compared with this, all objections to Christianity fade to insignificance.
    • Loren Anderson

  • Some conservative Christians argue in favor of hell by calling it "God's great compliment." "Compliment?" If hell is such a "compliment" then what does God do when he wants to "insult" somebody?
    • Ed Babinski

  • Somebody once wrote: 'Hell is the impossibility of reason.' That's what this place feels like. Hell.

  • Speaking on the teaching of Hell, if there is anything consistent among orthodox and traditional teachers on the subject, it would be their inconsistencies and contradictions.
    • Gary Amirault

  • Strange... a God who mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness, then invented Hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!

  • Tell me there is a God in the serene heavens that will damn his children for the expression of an honest belief! More men have died in their sins, judged by your orthodox creeds, than there are leaves on all the forests in the wide world ten thousand times over. Tell me these men are in hell; that these men are in torment; that these children are in eternal pain, and that they are to be punished forever and forever! I denounce this doctrine as the most infamous of lies.

  • That any should suffer forever, lingering on in hopeless despair, and rolling amidst infinite torments without the possibility of alleviation and without end; that since God can save men and will save a part, he has not proposed to save all-these are real, not imaginary, difficulties... My whole soul pants for light and relief on these questions. But I get neither; and in the distress and anguish of my own spirit, I confess that I see no light whatever. I see not one ray to disclose to me why sin came into the world; why the earth is strewn with the dying and the dead; and why man must suffer to all eternity. I have never seen a particle of light thrown on these subjects, that has given a moment's ease to my tortured min... I confess, when I look on a world of sinners and sufferers-upon death-beds and grave-yards-upon the world of woe filled with hosts to suffer for ever: when I see my friends, my family, my people, my fellow citizens when I look upon a whole race, all involved in this sin and danger-and when I see the great mass of them wholly unconcerned, and when I feel that God only can save them, and yet he does not do so, I am stuck dumb. It is all dark, dark, dark to my soul, and I cannot disguise it.

  • That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell.

  • The difficulty over the question of eternal torments lies in how it is irreconcilable with the goodness of God, to put any persons at all upon a necessity of making such an option, wherein if they choose amiss, the misery they incur must be irrevocable.

  • The gods have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that's where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won't do if they don't know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight.

  • The good Christian should beware of mathematicians... The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.
    • Saint Augustine

  • The fundamentalist belief system is one that purports to have all the answers. It also claims to be the only way — all deviations lead to hell. It follows then that parents who believe this would be very concerned about what their children believe. Any alternative ways of thinking about major life questions would be highly threatening. Consequently, the fundamentalist household rarely encourages children to explore their own thoughts, to be open-minded about ideas, or to come to their own conclusions. In fact, fundamentalist parents are typically vocal in their opposition to the teaching of critical thinking skills or values clarification in schools.
    • Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold

  • The idea that a good God would send people to a burning Hell is utterly damnable to me. The ravings of insanity! Superstition gone to seed! I don't want to have anything to do with such a God. No avenging Jewish God, no satanic devil, no fiery hell is of any interest to me.

  • The Puritan is simply one who, because of mental cowardice or religious superstition, is unable to get any joy out of the satisfaction of his natural appetites. Taking a drink, he fears that he is headed for the gutter. Grabbing a gal, he is staggered by thoughts of hell and syphilis. Observing that other men do such things innocently, he hates them.

  • The only thing that makes life endurable in this world is human love, and yet, according to Christianity, that is the very thing that we are not to have in the other world. We are to be so taken up with Jesus and angels, that we shall care nothing about our brothers and sisters that have been damned. We shall be so carried away with the music of the harp that we shall not even hear the wail of father and mother. Such a religion is a disgrace to human nature.

  • The whole point of Christianity is that everyone in the world, from Charles Manson to Mother Teresa, deserves to go to hell.
    • Sean P. Ningen

  • There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a "hottest part" implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool.

  • There is no Heaven, there is no Hell; These are the dreams of baby minds; Tools of the wily Fetisheer, To fright the fools his cunning blinds.

  • There were days when the Church could club men into obedience by preaching Hell to them, but that day has long passed. The world has outgrown it.

  • They say that when god was in Jerusalem he forgave his murderers, but now he will not forgive an honest man for differing with him on the subject of the Trinity. They say that God says to me, "Forgive your enemies." I say, "I do;" but he says, "I will damn mine." God should be consistent. If he wants me to forgive my enemies he should forgive his. I am asked to forgive enemies who can hurt me. God is only asked to forgive enemies who cannot hurt him. He certainly ought to be as generous as he asks us to be.

  • Those people who tell me that I'm going to hell while while they are going to heaven somehow make me very glad that we're going to separate destinations.
    • Martin Terman

  • This isn't hell, but you can see it from here.
    • The Crow Graphic Novel

  • [We are] among murderers. We are in hell, my dear, there is never a mistake and people are not damned for nothing.


  • We want ... to plunge into the depths of the abyss, Hell or Heaven, what does it matter? Into the depths of the Unknown to find something new!

  • When all has been considered, it seems to me to be the irresistible intuition that infinite punishment for finite sin would be unjust, and therefore wrong. We feel that even weak and erring Man would shrink from such an act. And we cannot conceive of God as acting on a lower standard of right and wrong.

  • When I see what the actual condition of the neglected and downtrodden races of men has been; if I thought that in addition to all this there was a God who stood at door where men go out of life to crush them downward into eternal hell - every instinct of charity, of sympathy and of love that is in me would stand crying. It would be the sorrow of the universe that would raise this cry.

  • When you die you go to heaven. Until then, welcome to hell!
    • Popular welcoming words in the Swedish army

  • Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?

  • Who would dare so much as to smile, if he really believed endless torments were certain to be the portion of some members of his household. Marriage would be a crime; each birth the occasion of an awful dread. The shadow of a possible Hell would darken every home, sadden every family hearth. All this becomes evident when we reflect, that to perpetuate the race would be to help on the perpetuation of moral evil. For if this creed be true, out of all the yearly births a stady current is flowing on to help fill the abyss of hell, to make larger and vaster the total moral evil which is to endure forever. 'The world would be one vast madhouse' says the American scholar Hallsted, 'if realizing and continued pressure of such a doctrine was present.'

  • Why were a few, or a single one, made at all, if only to exist in order to be made eternally miserable, which is infinitely worse than non-existence?

  • You are going to see again the child that was condemned to hell. See! it is a pitiful sight. The little child is in this red hot oven. Hear the fire! It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor. You can see on the face of this little child what you see on the faces of all in hell: despair, desperate and horrible. This child sinned, so God, in His mercy, called it out of the world in its early childhood.
    • from Tracts for Spiritual Reading, 1880, a Catholic Children's book.

  • You've got a Methodist Coloring Book
    And you color really well
    But don't color outside the lines
    Or God will send you to hell

  • Not even hell can hurt me.. Only hell can hurt you.
    • Krazaknan, the last one

  • And when his eyes go dead, the hell I send him to will seem like heaven after what I've done to him.
    • "Marv" in Sin City

  • The hottest places in hell are reserved for those, who in the time of greatest moral conflict, remain neutral.

  • The Hell Law says that Hell is reserved exclusively for them that believe in it. Further, the lowest Rung in Hell is reserved for them that believe in it on the supposition that they'll go there if they don't.

  • The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

  • Sometimes you go to hell, and sometimes hell comes to you.
    • Flavor Text of "Helldozer", a card from Magic: The Gathering

  • How deep its pit, how hot its fires, how strong its chains.
    • Anonymous.

  • From a hypothesis about hell existence the hypothesis about immorality of a child-bearing automatically follows.
    • Anonymous.

  • Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
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