In a place of all this beauty and potential...we just repeat the same mistakes. Do we hate paradise so much we have to be sure it becomes a trash heap?

I have read descriptions of Paradise that would make any sensible person stop wanting to go there.

It's Paradise, but we can't get out of it. And anything you can't get out of is Hell.

But we must lose our earthly Paradise in order actually to live in it, to experience it in the reality of its images, in the absolute sublimation that transcends all passion.

The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.

What if this life is the paradise we were promised, and we’re just squandering it?

Paradise is not the place in which you arrive but the journey toward it. Sometimes I think victories must be temporary or incomplete; what kind of humanity would survive paradise? The industrialized world has tried to approximate paradise in its suburbs, with luxe, calme, volupté, cul-de-sacs, cable television and two-car garages, and it has produced a soft ennui that shades over into despair and a decay of the soul suggesting that Paradise is already a gulag. Countless desperate teenagers will tell you so. For paradise does not require of us courage, selflessness, creativity, passion: paradise in all accounts is passive, is sedative, and if you read carefully, soulless.

If we ruin the earth, there is no place else to go

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.

"It is not that good people go to paradise - wherever good people are, it becomes paradise. And wherever stupid people and idiots are - they may be great believers in God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Bible, it does not matter - even paradise becomes a ruin. It becomes a hell." - Edmund Burke

The path to paradise begins in hell.

Certainly paradise, whatever, wherever it be, contains flaws. (Paradisical flaws, if you like.) If it did not, it would be incapable of drawing the hearts of men or angels.

If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.

Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the dream of a blessedness that may someday be again.