Hieronymus Bosch, “Four Visions of the Hereafter” (1500-04), oil on wood, each panel: 86.5 × 39.5 cm. Palazzo Grimani, Venice, Italy (Image via Wikimedia Commons) (click to enlarge)
The massive exhibition devoted to Hieronymus Bosch at the Noordbrabants Museum — located in the painter’s birthplace in the Netherlands — includes his “Four Visions of the Hereafter” (1500-04), depicting Earthly Paradise and the Ascent into Heaven on the right and the Fall of the Damned and Hell on the left.
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That’s why they invented hell.
—Bertrand Russell, “On the Value of Scepticism”
One was never married, and that’s his hell: another is, and that’s his plague.
—Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy
I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis. I use “religious” in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell.
—James Baldwin, “Letter from a Region in My Mind”
There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
—Norman Mailer
I wish I could tell you how lonely I am. How cold and harsh it is here. Everywhere there is conflict and unkindness. I think God has forsaken this place. I believe I have seen hell and it’s white, it’s snow-white.
—Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
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, “Prayer to Persephone”
Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay
Fierce and poisonous animals were created for terrifying man, in order that he might be made aware of the final judgment in hell.
—John Wesley
Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
—Jorge Luis Borges
I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control, and at times hard to handle, but if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.
—Marilyn Monroe
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.—Emily Dickinson, “My life closed twice before its close”
I was in a printing house in Hell, and saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.
—William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
If you think about it seriously, all the questions about the soul and the immortality of the soul and paradise and hell are at bottom only a way of seeing this very simple fact: that every action of ours is passed on to others according to its value, of good or evil, it passes from father to son, from one generation to the next, in a perpetual movement.
—Antonio Gramsci
A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
—George Bernard Shaw, Parents and Children
Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.
—Laurence J. Peter
If you are going through hell, keep going.
—Winston Churchill
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
—Antonin Artaud
I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
