Top 100 Emanuel Swedenborg Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Sacred scripture is like a mirror in which we see God, although each in a different way.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

52. “In a word, to grow old in heaven is to grow young.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

53. “The Lord casts no one down in Hell, but the spirit casts himself hither.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

54. “Goodness shapes our will, and truth shapes our understanding.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

55. “True wisdom is seeing what is beneficial to your eternal life, and managing your life according to that. You do this when you not only know these things and grasp them with your understanding, but also will and do them.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

56. “The Divine of the Lord in heaven is love, for the reason that love is receptive of all things of heaven, such as peace, intelligence, wisdom and happiness.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

57. “Heaven is not located on high, but where the good of love is, and this resides within a person, wherever he or she might be.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

58. “One’s distance from Heaven is in proportion to the measure of one’s self-love.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

59. “All religion relates to life, and the life of religion is to do good.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

60. “Justice is following the divine design in all that one does, and bringing back into the divine design things that have fallen away from that design. Justice is the divine design itself.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

61. “That every man after the life in the world lives to eternity, is evident from this, that man is then spiritual, and no longer natural, and that the spiritual man, separated from the natural, remains such as he is to eternity, for man’s state cannot be changed after death.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

62. “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.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

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

— Emanuel Swedenborg

64. “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.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

65. “Man is so created that as to his internal he cannot die; for he is capable of believing in God, and thus of being conjoined to God by faith and love, and to be conjoined to God is to live to eternity.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

66. “Angels can recognize the nature of our unique essence on the basis of nothing more than a brief conversation with us. From hearing the tone of our voice angels sense what we love; and from hearing what we say, angels sense our level of understanding.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

67. “The quality of the Lord’s church on earth, cannot be seen by any man, so long as he lives in the world, still less how the church in process of time has turned aside from good to evil.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

68. “The angels taken collectively are called heaven, for they constitute heaven; and yet that which makes heaven in general and in particular is the Divine that goes forth from the Lord and flows into the angels and is received by them.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

69. “First of all it must be known who the God of heaven is, since upon that all the other things depend.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

70. “Times of happiness, bliss, and sheer delight intensify as the higher levels of our minds are opened within us One our life on earth is over, these levels keep rising forever.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

71. “For in every particular of the Word there is an internal sense which treats of things spiritual and heavenly, not of things natural and worldly, such as are treated of in the sense of the letter.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

72. “Every man is received in heaven who receives heaven in himself while in the world, and he is excluded who does not.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

73. “In heaven there are two distinct loves, love to the Lord and love towards the neighbor, in the inmost or third heaven love to the Lord, in the second or middle heaven love towards the neighbor.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

74. “Wherefore the brain must be looked upon as the universal and general sensory and at the same time as the universal and general motory organ of the body and finally as the universal and general laboratory of the animal spirits and the blood or of the essential juices of life.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

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

— Emanuel Swedenborg

76. “The activity of love and faith is what makes heaven.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

77. “For the spiritual sense of the Word treats everywhere of the spiritual world, that is, of the state of the church in the heavens, as well as in the earth; hence the Word is spiritual and Divine.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

78. “All our longings for what is loving and true reach out into heaven. They put us in touch with angels who are feeling the same way and unite us with them.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

79. “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.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

80. “Further still, heaven is where the Lord is recognized, trusted, and loved. The different ways he is worshiped – in variations that stem from the difference of activity from one community to another – do not cause harm but bring benefit, because they are a source of heaven’s perfection.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

81. “The church of the Lord is spread over all the globe, and is thus universal; and all those are in it who have lived in the good of charity in accordance with their religion...”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

82. “We are, because God is.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

83. “This new church is the crown of all the churches that have ever existed on this planet because it will worship the one God, who can be seen, within whom is the God that cannot be seen, like a soul in a body.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

84. “Charity is like warmth in springtime or summer that causes grass, plants, and trees to grow. Without charity, or spiritual warmth, nothing grows.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

85. “He who is in evil, is also in the punishment of evil.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

86. “Our love is our life itself. What our love is like determines how we live and therefore everything about what we are as human beings.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

87. “This Divine truth flows into heaven from the Lord from His Divine love.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

88. “What is true is true, and what is false is false...”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

89. “Moreover, no one is judged from the natural man, thus not so long as he lives in the natural world, for man is then in a natural body; but everyone is judged in the spiritual man, and therefore when he comes into the spiritual world, for man is then in a spiritual body.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

90. “A person who knows all that is good and all that is true – as much as can be known – but does not resist evils, knows nothing.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

91. “Anyone can see that intending and not acting when we can is not really intending, and loving and not doing good when we can is not really loving.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

92. “A heavenly society is a harmony of many.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

93. “What a man thinks in his spirit in the world, that he does after his departure from the world when he becomes a spirit.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

94. “So far as the Angels are recipients of that spiritual heat and light they are loves and wisdoms, not loves and wisdoms for themselves, but from the Lord.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

95. “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.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

96. “To have dominion by religion, is to have dominion over men’s souls, thus over their very spiritual life, and to use the Divine things, which are in their religion, as the means.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

97. “And as the divine that goes forth from the Lord is the good of love and the truth of faith, the angels are angels and are heaven in the measure in which they receive good and truth from the Lord.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

98. “I am well aware that many will say that no one can possibly speak with spirits and angels so long as he lives in the body; and many will say that it is all fancy, others that I relate such things in order to gain credence, and others will make other objections.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

99. “In the spiritual body moreover, man appears such as he is with respect to love and faith, for everyone in the spiritual world is the effigy of his own love, not only as to the face and the body, but also as to the speech and the actions.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg

100. “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. There.”

— Emanuel Swedenborg