C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Hell

Hell is the wrath of God—His hate of sin.

Bailey.

Hell is truth seen too late.

H. G. Adams.

Hell is both sides of the tomb, and a devil may be respectable and wear good clothes.

Charles H. Parkhurst.

Hell is more bearable than nothingness.

Bailey.

Hell is full of good meanings and wishings.

Herbert.

Divines and dying men may talk of hell,
But in my heart her several torments dwell.

Shakespeare.

Long is the way
And hard, that out of hell leads up to light.

Milton.

Hell is no other but a soundless pit,
Where no one beame of comfort peeps in it.

Herrick.

That’s the greatest torture souls feel in hell,
In hell, that they must live, and cannot die.

John Webster.

Self-love and the love of the world constitute hell.

Swedenborg.

I think the devil will not have me damned, lest the oil that’s in me should set hell on fire.

Shakespeare.

Hell is paved with good intentions.

Samuel Johnson.

Hell, their fit habitation, fraught with fire
Unquenchable, the house of woe and pain.

Milton.

Eternal torments, baths of boiling sulphur,
Vicissitude of fires, and then of frosts.

Dryden.

Hell is empty,
And all the devils are here.

Shakespeare.

There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell but the mere pleasure of God.

Jonathan Edwards.

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

Milton.

Hell’s court is built deep in a gloomy vale,
High walled with strong damnation, moated round
With flaming brimstone.

Dr. Joseph Beaumont.

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

Ben Jonson.

No hell will frighten men away from sin; no dread of prospective misery; only goodness can cast hell out of any man, and set up the kingdom of heaven within.

Hugh R. Haweis.

Myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide;
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.

Milton.

There is in hell a place stone-built throughout,
Called Malebolge, of an iron hue,
Like to the wall that circles it about.

Dante.

We spirits have just such natures
We had for all the world, when human creatures;
And, therefore, I, that was an actress here,
Play all my tricks in hell, a goblin there.

Dryden.

Nay, then, what flames are these that leap and swell
As ’twere to show, where earth’s foundations crack,
The secrets of the sepulchres of hell
On Dante’s track?

Swinburne.

The place thou saw’st was hell, the groans thou heard’st
The wailings of the damn’d, of those who would
Not be redeem’d.

Pollok.

Ev’n thus in hell, wander the restless damn’d:
From scorching flames to chilling frosts they run;
Then from their frosts to fires return again,
And only prove variety of pain.

Rowe.

A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,
As one great furnace, flamed; yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv’d only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end.

Milton.

In the utmost solitudes of nature, the existence of hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual utterances as that of heaven.

Ruskin.

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?

James Hamilton.

Hell has no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place; but where we are is hell
And where hell is, there must we ever be;
And to be short, when all the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that are not heaven.

Marlowe.

A dark
Illimitable ocean, without bound,
Without dimension; where length, breadth, and highth,
And time, and place, are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos—ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise
Of endless wars, and by confusion stand.

Milton.

A universe of death
Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things
Abominable, unutterable, and worse
Than fables yet have feign’d, or fear conceived.

Milton.

Hell is a city much like London—
A populous and a smoky city;
There are all sorts of people undone,
And there is little or no fun done;
Small justice shown, and still less pity.
*****
Lawyers—judges—old hobnobbers
Are there—bailiffs—chancellors
Bishops—great and little robbers—
Rhymesters—pamphleteers—stock-jobbers—
Men of glory in the wars.

Shelley.

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 threatenings 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.

Edward Thomson.

In the throat
Of Hell, before the very vestibule
Of opening Orcus, sit Remorse and Grief,
And pale Disease, and sad Old Age and Fear,
And Hunger that persuades to crime, and Want:
Forms terrible to see. Suffering and Death
Inhabit here, and Death’s own brother Sleep;
And the mind’s evil lusts and deadly War,
Lie at the threshold, and the iron beds
Of the Eumenides; and Discord wild
Her viper-locks with bloody fillets bound.

Virgil.

There is a place in a black and hollow vault,
Where day is never seen; there shines no sun,
But flaming horror of consuming fires;
A lightless sulphur, chok’d with smoky fogs
Of an infected darkness; in this place
Dwell many thousand thousand sundry sorts
Of never dying deaths; there damn’d souls
Roar without pity; there are gluttons fed
With toads and adders; there is burning oil
Pour’d down the drunkard’s throat; the usurer
Is forc’d to sup whole draughts of molten gold;
There is the murderer forever stabb’d,
Yet can he never die; there lies the wanton
On racks of burning steel, while in his soul
He feels the torment of his raging lust;
There stand those wretched things,
Who have dream’d out whole years in lawless sheets,
And secret incests, cursing one another.

John Ford.

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!

Richard Fuller.

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