Flannery O'Connor Quotes

Approval or blame will follow in the world to come.

Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.

If there is no hell, a good many preachers are obtaining money under false pretenses.

I cannot help thinking that the menace of Hell makes as many devils as the severe penal codes of inhuman humanity make villains.

He who is in evil, is also in the punishment of evil.

The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of great moral crises maintain their neutrality.

If any man err from the right way, it is his own misfortune, no injury to thee; nor therefore art thou to punish him in the things of this life because thou supposest he will be miserable in that which is to come.

Heaven and hell are something that people create to make some people feel guilty and other people like myself laugh.

... No one "gets away" with evil. Judgment always comes, only the timing is uncertain.

Those who are not Christians go to a place of suffering and torment called hell.

Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there.

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.

If religion is a reaction of man, and nothing more, it seems to me that it represents a human desire for wrongdoers to be punished. I hate the idea of Idi Amin living in Saudi Arabia for the last 25 years of his life. That galls me to no end. I feel some sort of need for biblical atonement, or justice, or something. I like to believe there is some comeuppance, that karma kicks in at some point, even if it takes years or decades to happen. My girlfriend says this great thing that’s become my philosophy as well. 'I want to believe there's a heaven. But I can't not believe there's a hell.'

This temporal fire is but a painted fire in respect of that penetrating and real fire in hell.

Some things come with their own punishments.

He who makes his law a curse, by his own law shall surely die.

In Heaven, there are no debts - all have been paid, one way or another - but in Hell there's nothing but debts, and a great deal of payment is exacted, though you can't ever get all paid up. You have to pay, and pay, and keep on paying. So Hell is like an infernal maxed-out credit card that multiplies the charges endlessly.

I'd rather go to hell than be in purgatory...

Whatever our creed, we feel that no good deed can by any possibility go unrewarded, no evil deed unpunished.

When we die, our souls still live. If you are a gangster or a bastard or a crook, your soul inhabits a donkey or something terrible.

Bankers - pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.

I believe in a packed Heaven and an empty Hell.

I wanted to show that crime doesn't pay. If you are saved and accept the Lord, you cannot use that as an excuse to avoid punishment.