It can truly be said: Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are the tormented souls.

Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are the tormented souls.

- <i>On Religion</i>

You wrote somewhere that one sins in another world, and that this world is hell. For you, that may have been just a phrase, but it’s the truth.
Brother Beetle

Hell is other people

If you look at any religious description of hell, it is the same as human society, the way we dream. Hell is a place of suffering, a place of fear, a place of war and violence, a place of judgment and no justice, a place of punishment that never ends. There are humans versus humans in a jungle of predators; humans full of judgment, full of blame, full of guilt, full of emotional poison — envy, anger, hate, sadness, suffering. We create all these little demons in our mind because we have learned to dream hell in our own life.

If you look at any religious description of hell, it is the same as human society, the way we dream. Hell is a place of suffering, a place of fear, a place of war and violence, a place of judgment and no justice, a place of punishment that never ends.

Hell is the inability to love.

To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause: that is Hell.

My friend, there is a Hell. It's when a man has a family to support, has his health and is ready to work, and there is no work to do. When he stands with empty hands and sees his children going hungry, his wife without the things to do with. I hope you never have to try it.

<i>Because to live in a world in which no one is forgiven, where all are irredeemable, is the same as living in hell.</i>

O shame to men! Devil with devil damned
Firm concord holds, men only disagree
Of creatures rational, though under hope
Of heavenly grace: and God proclaiming peace,
Yet live in hatred, enmity, and strife
Among themselves, and levy cruel wars,
Wasting the earth, each other to destroy:
As if (which might induce us to accord)
Man had not hellish foes enough besides,
That day and night for his destruction wait.

Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.

We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.

The world is perhaps ultimately to be defined as a place of suffering. Man is a suffering animal, subject to ceaseless anxiety and pain and fear.