One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
~ W. H. Auden

Hell is out of fashion -- institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.
~ J. G. Ballard

Of all the inhabitants of the inferno, none but Lucifer knows that hell is hell, and the secret function of purgatory is to make of heaven an effective reality.
~ Arnold Bennett

And what have you laymen made of hell? A kind of penal servitude for eternity, on the lines of your convict prisons on earth, to which you condemn in advance all the wretched felons your police have hunted from the beginning -- ''enemies of society,'' as you call them. You're kind enough to include the blasphemers and the profane. What proud or reasonable man could stomach such a notion of God's justice? And when you find that notion inconvenient it's easy enough for you to put it on one side. Hell is not to love any more, Madame. Not to love any more!
~ Georges Bernanos

Hell is paved with great granite blocks hewn from the hearts of those who said, ''I can do no other.''
~ Heywood Broun

I cannot help thinking that the menace of Hell makes as many devils as the severe penal codes of inhuman humanity make villains.
~ Lord Byron

To appreciate heaven well, it's good for a person to have some fifteen minutes of hell.
~ Will Carleton

The hell of these days is the fear of not getting along, especially of not making money.
~ Thomas Carlyle

Abandon all hope, you who enter here!
~ Dante (Alighieri)

There sighs, lamentations and loud wailings resounded through the starless air, so that at first it made me weep; strange tongues, horrible language, words of pain, tones of anger, voices loud and hoarse, and with these the sound of hands, made a tumult which is whirling through that air forever dark, and sand eddies in a whirlwind.
~ Dante (Alighieri)

Hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.
~ T. S. Eliot

Hell is a half-filled auditorium.
~ Robert Frost

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.
~ Robert Frost

To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be -- I hope it is -- redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable.
~ William Golding

Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.
~ Dick Gregory

When I pastored a country church, a farmer didn't like the sermons I preached on hell. He said, ''Preach about the meek and lowly Jesus.'' I said, ''That's where I got my information about hell.''
~ Vance Havner

Hell is paved with good Samaritans.
~ William M. Holden

Hell is where everyone is doing his own thing. Paradise is where everyone is doing God's thing.
~ Thomas Howard

There is no greater hell than to be a prisoner of fear.
~ Ben Johnson

The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.
~ Martin Luther King Jr.