Emanuel Swedenborg

Charity is like warmth in springtime or summer that causes grass, plants, and trees to grow. Without charity, or spiritual warmth, nothing grows.

It can in no sense be said that heaven is outside of any one; it is within ... and a man, also, so far as he receives heaven, is a recipient, a heaven, and an angel.

I have seen a thousand times that Angels are human form, or men, for I have conversed with them as man to man, sometimes with one alone, sometimes with many in company.

True charity is the desire to be useful to others with no thought of recompense.

Hell and Heaven are near man, yes, in him; and every man after death goes to that Hell or heaven in which he was, or to his spirit, during his abode in the world.

For in every particular of the Word there is an internal sense which treats of things spiritual and heavenly, not of things natural and worldly, such as are treated of in the sense of the letter.

If love is not married to wisdom (or if goodness is not married to truth), it cannot accomplish anything.

God created us in such a way that our inner self is in the spiritual world and our outer self is in the physical world. This was so that the spiritual part of us, which belongs in heaven, could be planted in the physical part the way a seed is planted in the ground.

In a word, to grow old in heaven is to grow young.

Everything good or true that the angels inspire in us is God's, so God is constantly talking to us. He talks very differently, though, to one person than to another.

A person's life from infancy to old age is nothing else than an advance from the world towards heaven, the last stage of which is death; the actual transition from one life to the next.

This I can declare: things that are in heaven are more real than things that are in the world.

Charity means love towards the neighbor and compassion, for anyone who loves his neighbor as himself also has as much compassion for him in his suffering as he does for himself in his own.

Kindness is an inner desire that makes us want to do good things even if we do not get anything in return. It is the joy of our life to do them. When we do good things from this inner desire, there is kindness in everything we think, say, want, and do.