Emmanuel Swedenborg Quotes

People are unaware that spirits even exist, let alone that angels are present with them.

People who have intended and loved what is evil in the world intend and love what is evil in the other life, and then they no longer allow themselves to be led away from it. This is why people who are absorbed in evil are connected to hell and actually are there in spirit; and after death they crave above all to be where their evil is. So after death, it is we, not the Lord, who cast ourselves into hell.

I asked, “What does a religion need to be like in order to save people?” They said, “We are going to divide this question into a number of subquestions. Before we have come to conclusions on these we will not be able to give a reply to your question. The points for discussion will be the following. (1) Is religion anything? (2) Does salvation exist or not? (3) Is one religion more effective than another? (4) Do heaven and hell exist?

Angels from the Lord lead and protect us every moment and every moment of every moment.

Love consists in desiring to give what is our own to another and feeling his delight as our own

Historical faith causes the Lord to be present, because it is an intuition of the Lord from the quality of His Divinity. That faith does not save, until man lives the life of faith, which is charity, for he then wills and does the things which he believes, and to will and to do is of the love, and love conjoins him whom faith causes to be present.

A life of faith without love is like sunlight without warmth — the type of light that occurs in winter, when nothing grows and everything droops and dies. Faith rising out of love, on the contrary, is like light from the sun in spring, when everything grows and flourishes. Warmth from the sun is the fertile agent. The same is true in spiritual and heavenly affairs, which are typically represented in the Word by objects found in nature and human culture.

Some hells present an appearance like the ruins of houses and cities after conflagrations, in which infernal spirits dwell and hide themselves. In the milder hells there is an appearance of rude huts, in some cases contiguous in the form of a city with lanes and streets.

Every falsity is something we can convince ourselves of, and when we have done so it seems to us to be the truth:

So anyone who has the quality of goodness from the Lord is an angel-person.g

The Divine Human from eternity was the Divine truth in heaven, and the Divine passing through heaven, thus the Divine Existere which afterward in the Lord became the Divine Esse by Itself [per se], from which is the Divine Existere in heaven,

[...]heaven is such that all people of every religion whatever who live rightly have a place there.

We can see that this underlies all perfection from every instance of beauty, charm, and delight that moves both our senses and our spirits. Such instances arise and flow invariably from a harmonious agreement of many things that are in sympathetic concord, whether they are together simultaneously or follow in a sequence. They do not flow from a single unit that lacks plurality. So we say that variety delights, and recognize that the delight depends on the quality of the variety. We can see from this, as though in a mirror, how perfection stems from variety in heaven as well, since things that happen in the natural world offer us a reflection of things in the spiritual world.d

Man, when he is re-born, passes through the ages as he who is born; and the preceding state is always as an egg in respect to the subsequent one, thus he is continually conceived and born: and this not only when he lives in the world, but also when he comes into another life to eternity: and still when he cannot be further perfected, then to be as an egg to those things which remain to be manifested, which are indefinite.

All in heaven take joy in sharing their delights and blessings with others.