Pastoral Resources

My mother had been educated at a convent, and she had been converted to communism by my father during Stalin's most rampant period, at the beginning of the 1930s. So she had two gods, God in heaven and god on earth.

How gently rock yon poplars high Against the reach of primrose sky With heaven's pale candles stored.

The Church has always been willing to swap off treasures in heaven for cash down.

Let us put theology out of religion. Theology has always sent the worst to heaven, the best to hell.

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.

There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.

Thou art not for the earth, nor for the Heaven the world is for thee, thou art not for the world.

An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.

If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven.

Heaven will be no heaven to me if I do not meet my wife there.

If you believe in God, He will open the windows of heaven and pour blessings upon you.

But all lost things are in the angels' keeping, Love; No past is dead for us, but only sleeping, Love; The years of Heaven with all earth's little pain Make Good Together there we can begin again, In babyhood.

The pain comes from knowing that we have never been safe, and therefore will never be safe again. It comes from knowing we can never be so ignorant again. It comes from knowing we can never be children again. Losing innocence. Remembering heaven. That was the essence of hell.

Be at peace with your own soul, then heaven and earth will be at peace with you.

But the law of God came from heaven indeed. God wrote it with his finger, it is the fountain of all wisdom, and therefore shall it continue for ever, and never have an end.

Among all his creatures in heaven or earth, God hath not made any like unto the sun in the firmament, the beams whereof are beautiful and pleasant, and do give comfort in all places to all things.

There will be a meeting of the great powers who will disagree, and the next noise we hear will be the screeching of elevators going up and down from heaven to hell.

You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.

Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.

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?