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.

It is recognized that non-Christians live lives that are just as moral as the lives of Christians — many of them, in fact, live more moral lives. A moral life may be lived either to satisfy the Divine or to satisfy people in this world. A moral life that is lived to satisfy the Divine is a spiritual life. The two look alike in outward form, but inwardly they are totally different. One saves us, the other does not. This is because if we live a moral life to satisfy the Divine we are being led by the Divine; while if we live a moral life to satisfy people in this world, we are being led by ourselves.

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.

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.

for every man’s soul is in a spiritual body after it has cast off the material coverings which it carried about in the world.

It is amazing but true that it is easy for any of us to rebuke someone else who is intending to do something evil and say, “Don’t do that — that’s a sin!” And yet it is difficult for us to say the same thing to ourselves. The reason is that saying it to ourselves requires a movement of the will, but saying it to someone else requires only a low level of thought based on things we have heard.

Others work among the spirits that have just arrived in the world of spirits. Again others raise the children who have died in infancy. Swedenborg ensures the parents of these infants that 'All children whether born within or outside of the church, are adopted by the Lord and become Angels'.

There are two loves that have been deeply rooted in the human race for a long time now: love for dominating everyone, and love for possessing everyone’s wealth. If the reins are let out on the first type of love, it rushes on until it wants to be the God of all heaven. If the reins are let out on the second type of love, it rushes on until it wants to be the God of the whole world. All other forms of love for evil are ranked below these two and serve as their army.

The spiritual idea of distances of space is the same as of distances of good or distances of truth, which are affinities and likenesses according to states of goodness and truth.

What could be sweeter to us than to hear and persuade ourselves that we can be saved, even if we live like a savage beast? Even non-Christians see that this is false, and many of them shudder at Christian teachings when they observe how Christians live.

A spiritual church first becomes a church when it acts as bidden by charity, charity being the true teaching of faith.

All the ancient churches were churches representative of spiritual things; the rites, and also the statutes, according to which their worship was established, consisted of pure correspondence.

When they enter the church, and even more when they climb the stairs into the pulpit, I know that the people meant by Lucifer in Isaiah — the people of Babylon, especially those who named themselves the Society of Jesus — are overcome with passion. For many of them that passion comes from a hellish love. They raise their voices more vehemently and draw sighs from their chests more deeply than those whose passion comes from a heavenly love.

Later on, a long sheet of paper was given to me by some spirits from Mercury. It was irregularly shaped because it was made up of a number of individual pages glued together. It seemed to have typeset printing on it, the kind we have in our world. I asked whether they had that sort of thing in their world and they said that they did not, but that they knew that we had printed pages like that in our world. They did not want to say more than that, but I perceived they were thinking that knowledge in our world exists on paper and not in human minds. In fact, they made jokes about pieces of paper on Earth knowing things that the people there do not know. However, the reality of the situation was explained to them.