60 Quotes About Hell

Hell has been a topic of fascination and dread across cultures and religions for centuries. It represents both a place of eternal punishment and a metaphor for the struggles we face in life. The imagery and ideas it evokes have inspired countless writers, poets, and thinkers to comment on its nature and the lessons it imparts. In exploring hell, we often uncover insights about human nature, morality, and the consequences of our actions. Our curated collection of the top 60 quotes about hell will take you on a thought-provoking journey through literature, philosophy, and spirituality. These quotes challenge us to reflect on our own beliefs and provide unique perspectives on this enduring theme. Join us as we delve into the depths of what hell signifies and the wisdom it offers.

1. “Remorse is a virtue in that it is a stirrer up of the emotions but it is a folly to accept it is a criticism of conduct.” - William Carlos Williams

2. “There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose- red grasses and you- in your apron hurrying to catch- say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put wings at your heels, at your knees.” - William Carlos Williams

3. “Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.” - Aldous Huxley

4. “You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” - C.S. Lewis

5. “You don't have to believe in Hell. All you need is to hear someone who really does, who believes in it this minute, today, the way people believe in 1685 — all you have to do is see his face, his voice when he says the word... and than you know that anyone who can imagine Hell has the power to make it real for other people.” - Peter S. Beagle

6. “Heaven would be Hell in no time if every cruel, selfish, vicious soul went to Heaven.” - Anne Rice

7. “The path to paradise begins in hell.” - Dante Alighieri

8. “No sight so sad as that of a naughty child," he began, "especially a naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death?""They go to hell," was my ready and orthodox answer."And what is hell? Can you tell me that?""A pit full of fire.""And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?""No, sir.""What must you do to avoid it?"I deliberated a moment: my answer, when it did come was objectionable: "I must keep in good health and not die.” - Charlotte Brontë

9. “After Hatuey, a fifteenth-century Indian insurrectionist, had been fixed to the stake, his Spanish captors extended him the choice of converting to Christianity and ascending to Heaven of going unrepentantly to Hell. Gathering that his executioners expected to go to heaven, Hatuey chose the other” - Kathy Acker

10. “Hold back the edges of your gown, Ladies, we are going through hell.” - William Carlos Williams

11. “Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.” - Jorge Luis Borges

12. “And so, given the musical sensibilities Hatcher treasured in his earthly life, it is hard to exaggerate the severity of his torture at standing naked in his tiny kitchen in Hell as former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sings a Bee Gees disco song backed by a full studio orchestra and Robin and Maurice.” - Robert Olen Butler

13. “Faustus, who embraced evil and shunned righteousness, became the foremost symbol of the misuse of free will, that sublime gift from God with its inherent opportunity to choose virtue and reject iniquity. “What shall a man gain if he has the whole world and lose his soul,” (Matt. 16: v. 26) - but for a notorious name, the ethereal shadow of a career, and a brief life of fleeting pleasure with no true peace? This was the blackest and most captivating tragedy of all, few could have remained indifferent to the growing intrigue of this individual who apparently shook hands with the devil and freely chose to descend to the molten, sulphuric chasm of Hell for all eternity for so little in exchange. It is a drama that continues to fascinate today as powerfully as when Faustus first disseminated his infamous card in the Heidelberg locale to the scandal of his generation. In fine, a life of good or evil, the hope of Heaven or the despair of Hell, Faustus stands as a reminder that the choice between these two absolutes also falls to us.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

14. “The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. (It's the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall.” - Christopher Hitchens

15. “Though I obviously have no proof of this, the one aspect of life that seems clear to me is that good people do whatever they believe is the right thing to do. Being virtuous is hard, not easy. The idea of doing good things simply because you're good seems like a zero-sum game; I'm not even sure those actions would still qualify as 'good,' since they'd merely be a function of normal behavior. Regardless of what kind of god you believe in--a loving god, a vengeful god, a capricious god, a snooty beret-wearing French god, or whatever--one has to assume that you can't be penalized for doing the things you believe to be truly righteous and just. Certainly, this creates some pretty glaring problems: Hitler may have thought he was serving God. Stalin may have thought he was serving God (or something vaguely similar). I'm certain Osama bin Laden was positive he was serving God. It's not hard to fathom that all of those maniacs were certain that what they were doing was right. Meanwhile, I constantly do things that I know are wrong; they're not on the same scale as incinerating Jews or blowing up skyscrapers, but my motivations might be worse. I have looked directly into the eyes of a woman I loved and told her lies for no reason, except that those lies would allow me to continue having sex with another woman I cared about less. This act did not kill 20 million Russian peasants, but it might be more 'diabolical' in a literal sense. If I died and found out I was going to hell and Stalin was in heaven, I would note the irony, but I couldn't complain. I don't make the fucking rules.” - Chuck Klosterman

16. “I think if Eternity held torment, its form would not be fiery rack, nor its nature, despair. I think that on a certain day amongst those days which never dawned, and will not set, an angel entered Hades — stood, shone, smiled, delivered a prophecy of conditional pardon, kindled a doubtful hope of bliss to come, not now, but at a day and hour unlooked for, revealed in his own glory and grandeur the height and compass of his promise: spoke thus — then towering, became a star, and vanished into his own Heaven. His legacy was suspense — a worse boon than despair.” - Charlotte Brontë

17. “Smartass Disciple: Master, why heaven is up there and hell is down there ?Master of Stupidity: If otherwise, it wouldn't be celebrated as ascension day.” - Toba Beta

18. “Do you think there's such a thing as a ghost who masquerades as a person? Do you believe that there are people whose bodies are still alive here on earth but whose souls are already in hell?” - Ann-Marie MacDonald

19. “In later life I have been sometimes praised, sometimes mocked, for my way of pointing out the mythical elements that seem to me to underlie our apparently ordinary lives. Certainly that cast of mind had some of its origin in our pit, which had much the character of a Protestant Hell. I was probably the most entranced listener to a sermon the Reverend Andrew Bowyer preached about Gehenna, the hateful valley outside the walls of Jerusalem, where outcasts lived, and where their flickering fires, seen from the city walls, may have given rise to the idea of a hell of perpetual burning. He liked to make his hearers jump, now and then, and he said that our gravel pit was much the same sort of place as Gehenna. My elders thought this far-fetched, but I saw no reason then why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited quite a few of them since.” - Robertson Davies

20. “No, there are no special places in hell. Hell is a democracy.” - Mike Carey

21. “Hell wasn't a major reservoir of evil, any more then Heaven, in Crowley's opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind.” - Terry Pratchett

22. “Lost in Hell,-Persephone,Take her head upon your knee;Say to her, "My dear, my dear,It is not so dreadful here.” - Edna St. Vincent Millay

23. “I tell you such fine music waits in the shadows of hell.” - Charles Bukowski

24. “We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.” - C.S. Lewis

25. “There was, no doubt, a confusion of persons in damnation: what Pantheists falsely hoped of Heaven bad men really received in Hell. They were melted down into their Master, as a lead soldier slips down and loses his shape in the ladle over the gas ring.” - C.S. Lewis

26. “You twitch as the darkness moves in and out of you. It crawls up your spine and nestles in your brain like an evil thought from out of nowhere, burying itself in your psyche like a starving leech looking for a vein.” - Stephen Biro

27. “At the end of medicine is dope; at the end of life is death; at the end of man may be the Hell which arrives from the vanities of the mind.” - Norman Mailer

28. “I am fashionably unimpressed with the material world. I am moved by the beauty of aspiration, and I hope that I can elevate myself to the standards I have imposed on others.” - Mike Corbett

29. “There is a sort of mental treasonThat smothers dreams outside of reason” - Mike Corbett

30. “After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?” - E.M. Forster

31. “*For eleven years, I've been worked over and abused in ways you can't imagine by things you don't want to know about. I've killed every kind of vile, black-souled, dead-eyed nightmare that ever made you piss your pjs and cry for mommy in the middle of the night. I kill monsters and, if I wanted, I could say a word and burn you to powder from the inside out. I can tear any human you ever met to rages with my bare hands. Give me one good reason why I could possibly need you?*She looks straight at me, not blinking. No fear in her eyes.*Because you might be the Tasmanian Devil and the Angel of Death all rolled into one, but you don't even know how to get a phone.*I hate to admit it, but she has a point.” - Richard Kadrey

32. “Once very near the end I said, 'If you can -- if it is allowed -- come to me when I too am on my death bed.' 'Allowed!' she said. 'Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I'd break it into bits.” - C.S. Lewis

33. “Everyone who has ever built anywhere a new heaven first found the power thereto in his own hell.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

34. “The earth is neither fabulous nor paradisal. And therefore it is not hell.” - j.m.g. le clezio

35. “You turn the light on, you get all kinds of bugs.” - Rob Bell

36. “Love demands freedom. It always has, and it always will. We are free to resist, reject, and rebel against God's ways for us. We can have all the hell we want.” - Rob Bell

37. “It was the only lullaby she would ever sing, and it was sung in Hell.” - Laini Taylor

38. “La mu’axsa, but I think I’ll just keep sliding down this greased pole to hell?” - V.S. Carnes

39. “No, I thought. Not just Hell. Really, Heaven was just as guilty. What kind of group could advocate goodness and not allow its members to love?” - Richelle Mead

40. “Hell didn't make me a monster. It just confirmed all my worst fears about myself.” - Richard Kadrey

41. “God is angry with man. Unless we believe and repent we shall all be damned. It is impossible, indeed, for its advocates even to say this without instantly contradicting themselves. Their doctrine frightens them. They explain in various ways that a great many people will be saved without believing, and that eternal damnation is not eternal nor damnation.” - Leslie Stephen

42. “Hell is truth seen too late.” - Thomas Hobbes

43. “(Marlowe's) Faustus stubbornly reverts to his atheistic beliefs and continues his elementary pagan re-education ~ the inferno to him is a 'place' invented by men.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

44. “Life is whatever you make it, a heaven or hell on earth.” - Steven Redhead

45. “Tolstoy said, 'The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed either by a change of life or by a change of conscience.' Many of us have elected to adjust our consciences rather than our lives. Our powers of rationalization are unlimited. They allow us to live in luxury and indifference while others, whom we could help if we chose to, starve and go to hell.” - Randy Alcorn

46. “People often speak of hell, not wanting to go there, avoiding it..etc. I never had that problem because hell is a state of mind. Look around you; rape, murder, wars, hatred, envy...my friend; you're already there!!” - Sandra Chami Kassis

47. “War is war and Hell is hell, and if you ask me, War is a lot worse.” - Alan Alda

48. “The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.” - Yukio Mishima

49. “Hell's only the flip side of Paradise. Sometimes it's hard to differentiate between the two.” - Sara Craven

50. “You listen to me, and listen good!" she shouted, shocking me. "I am not evil because I have a thousand years of demon smut on my soul!" she exclaimed, the tips of her hair trembling and her face flushed. "Every time you disturb reality, nature has to balance it out. The black on your soul isn't evil, it's a promise to make up for what you have done. It's a mark, not a death sentence. And you can get rid of it given time.""Ceri, I'm sorry," I fumbled, but she wasn't listening. "You're an ignorant, foolish, stupid witch," she berated, and I cringed, my grip tightening on the copper spell pot and feeling the anger from her like a whip. "Are you saying because I carry the stink of demon magic, that I'm a bad person?""No..." I wedged in."That God will show no pity?" she said, green eyes flashing. "That because I made one mistake in fear that led to a thousand more that I will burn in hell?""No. Ceri -" I took a step forward."My soul is black," she said, her fear showing in her suddenly pale cheeks. "I'll never be rid of it all before I die, but it won't be because I'm a bad person but because I was a frightened one.” - Kim Harrison

51. “Nafasi yako peponi itapotea iwapo utamruhusu Pluto (kiongozi wa ahera) akukaribishe bazarai (makao makuu ya ahera) kwa kuchukua maisha yako mwenyewe. Kujiua ni kujipenda zaidi kuliko unaowapenda. Anayejiua hujifikiria zaidi yeye kuliko wengine.” - Enock Maregesi

52. “I find the concept of Hell to be more honest than that of everyday life. In Hell, no one can lie to you, because you already know what to expect for the rest of eternity. Nothing more and nothing less.” - Lionel Suggs

53. “There’s an idea that hell is other people. My idea is that it might be repetition.” - Stephen King

54. “As you can imagine, those who had fallen this far had been so worn down by their tortures in the seven other hells that they no longer had the strength to cry out.” - Ryunosuke Akutagawa

55. “You have a perfect right to consign us all to hell, rector, but you must allow us the choice of how we get there.Raspberry Jam” - Angus Wilson

56. “Just because a person successfully steers a voyage through hell doesn't mean he ever wants to sail that route again.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

57. “When it is recalled that until the Christian era the underworld was never regardded as a hostile area, that all gods were useful and essentially friendly to man despite occasional lapsesl when we see the steady methodical inculcation into humanity of the idea of man's worthlesseness - until redeemed - the necessity of the Devil may become evident as a weapon, a weapon designed and used time and time again in every age to whip men into a surrender to a particular church or church state.” - Arthur Miller

58. “Heaven and hell could wait.He had paradise right there in his arms.” - Cynthia Eden

59. “I do believe in hell as a state of being or consciousness, and I believe that people can dwell in hell and that many do, right now, today, on this earth before rather than after death. I will argue ... that hell is the most erroneous, oudated, misunderstood, and misguided dogma in all of Christianity, and the one that must be discarded if this spiritual tradition is to survive as anything more than a contemptable curiosity.” - Carlton D. Pearson

60. “I feared the defining point of this Hell was its unrelenting uniformity, its lack of variation from type. If there was a heaven at the end of this, it must be filled with great variety, perhaps a multiplicity of intelligent species spread across universes. Yes, heaven would be as full of difference as Hell was of sameness.” - Steven L. Peck