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 … - Emmanuel Swedenborg

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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.

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About Emmanuel Swedenborg

Emanuel Swedenborg (29 January 1688 – 29 March 1772) was a Swedish philosopher, mystic, and scientist.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Emanuel Swedenborg
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Additional quotes by Emmanuel Swedenborg

Because these judges do not see justice at all, we in heaven view them not as human beings but as monstrous human images: their heads are made of friendship, their chests are made of injustice, their arms and legs are made of supporting arguments, and the soles of their feet are made of justice. If a particular form of justice doesn’t favor their friend, they remove it and trample it. [5] You are about to find out what they are truly like inside. Their end has come.” Then

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.

Goodwill has something in common with each of these categories of love, because goodwill is by definition a love for usefulness of all kinds. Goodwill wants to do what is good for our neighbor, and goodness is the same as usefulness. Each of the categories of love just mentioned have usefulness as their goal: love for heaven has the goal of being useful in spiritual ways; love for the world has the goal of being useful in earthly ways, which could also be called forms of civil service; and love for ourselves has the goal of being useful in physical ways, which could also be labeled benefits at home for ourselves and our loved ones.

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