I have seen descriptions of Paradise sufficient to make all sensible people give up their hopes of it.

Do we hate paradise so much we need to make sure it becomes a trash heap?

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

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?

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.

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.

What are you afraid of?
I'm afraid of not recognizing Paradise.

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.

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.

The only true paradise is paradise lost

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.

It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere.

"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

It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.