A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.


Abandon all hope, you who enter here!


And what have you laymen made of hell? A kind of penal servitude for eternity, on the lines of your convict prisons on earth, to which you condemn in advance all the wretched felons your police have hunted from the beginning — ''enemies of society,'' as you call them. You're kind enough to include the blasphemers and the profane. What proud or reasonable man could stomach such a notion of God's justice? And when you find that notion inconvenient it's easy enough for you to put it on one side. Hell is not to love any more, Madame. Not to love any more!


For mortal men there is but one hell, and that is the folly and wickedness and spite of his fellows; but once his life is over, there's an end to it: his annihilation is final and entire, of him nothing survives.


Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.


Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd one self place; for where we are is Hell, and where Hell is, there must we ever be.


Hell is a half-filled auditorium.


Hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.


Hell is other people.


Hell is out of fashion — institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.


Hell is paved with good Samaritans.


Hell is paved with great granite blocks hewn from the hearts of those who said, ''I can do no other.''


Hell is the highest reward that the devil can offer you for being a servant of his.


Hell is where everyone is doing his own thing. Paradise is where everyone is doing God's thing.


Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.


I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.


I cannot help thinking that the menace of Hell makes as many devils as the severe penal codes of inhuman humanity make villains.


I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.


If I'm going to Hell, I'm going there playing the piano.


If there is no Hell a good many preachers are obtaining money under false pretenses.

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