Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or else what's a heaven for?

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?

(a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?).

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?

Your reach should exceed your grasp, or what's a heaven for

A man's reach should exceed his grasp

A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor? (p.7)

‘Tis a good word and a profitable desire, but withal absurd; for to make the handle bigger than the hand, the cubic longer than the arm, and to hope to stride further than our legs can reach, is both impossible and monstrous; or that man should rise above himself and humanity; for he cannot see but with his eyes, nor seize but with his hold. He shall be exalted, if God will lend him an extraordinary hand; he shall exalt himself, by abandoning and renouncing his own proper means, and by suffering himself to be raised and elevated by means purely celestial. It belongs to our Christian faith, and not to the stoical virtue, to pretend to that divine and miraculous metamorphosis.

The more a man grasps and knows, the greater is the horizon which opens up before him.

Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.

Heaven is what you mix all the days of your life, but you call it dreams. You have one chance to buy your Heaven with all the intents and ethics of your life. That is why everyone considers Heaven such a lovely place. Because it is dreams, special dreams, in which you exist. What you have to do is live up to them.

'Tis thus that men to heaven aspire:
Go on and raise your glories higher.

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights...sexual intercourse!...His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

Certainly heaven is something we all need, however, we should not imagine it anthropomorphically. [...] I believe that we certainly cannot rule out the possibility of an existence outside of space and time, mass, energies and charges. In heaven there can be anything but that.