#paradise

Until the eighteenth century, people believed that biblical paradise, the Garden of Eden, was a real place. It appeared on maps--located, ironically, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is now modern-day Iraq. ↗

— Eric Weiner

#iraq #paradise #iraq

It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature. ↗

— John Drinkwater

#achievement #among #asserted #commonly #english

Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other. ↗

— Jean Baudrillard

#disneyland #just #may #monotonous #mournful

As memory may be a paradise from which we cannot be driven, it may also be a hell from which we cannot escape. ↗

— John Lancaster Spalding

#cannot #driven #escape #hell #may

But for Muslims, everything that they don't have on earth is what they get in heaven. They can drink, they can have sex. All of the forbidden pleasures on earth, you can have in paradise. ↗

— Barbara Walters

#earth #everything #forbidden #get #heaven

Only a fool would refuse to enter a fool's paradise when that's the only paradise he'll ever have a chance to enter. ↗

— Jessamyn West

#enter #ever #fool #only #paradise

Paradise,’ he began, and the p meant a spray. ‘The old legend about Paradise—that was about us, about right now. Yes! Just think about it. Those two in Paradise, they were offered a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness, nothing else. Those idiots chose freedom. And then what? Then for centuries they were homesick for the chains. That’s why the world was so miserable, see? They missed the chains. For ages! And we were the first to hit on the way to get back to happiness. No, wait ... listen to me. The ancient God and us, side by side, at the same table. Yes! We helped God finally overcome the Devil—because that’s who it was that pushed people to break the commandment and taste freedom and be ruined. It was him, the wily serpent. But we gave him a boot to the head! Crack! And it was all over: Paradise was back. And we’re simple and innocent again, like Adam and Eve. None of those complications about good and evil: Everything is very simple, childishly simple —Paradise! The Benefactor, the Machine, the Cube, the Gas Bell, the Guardians: All those things represent good, all that is sublime, splendid, noble, elevated, crystal pure. Because that is what protects our nonfreedom, which is to say, our happiness. ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#freedom #happiness #paradise #age

We did not get any money from the early records. It was all taken by crooked managers. It is just a gangster's paradise. ↗

— Robert Wyatt

#crooked #did #early #gangster #get

We'll tell him his mother waits for him in heaven, I suppose." "Is that a lie?" "It's what we tell fools and children." She sighed. "Postulating a heaven gives man an out for having been unable to retain the paradise he was given here on earth. ↗

— Sheri S. Tepper

#heaven #paradise #environmentalism

To Paradise, the Arabs say, Satan could never find the way Until the peacock led him in. ↗

— Charles Godfrey Leland

#could #find #him #led #never