Daily Quotes

Heaven’s union with us and our union with it are of such
a nature that each relies on the other.

The soul should be our purpose. Except that the soul
should not be a final, but only an intermediate purpose.
We should take care of our soul not for its own sake, but
for the sake of services we then perform in both worlds.
And when being useful is our goal, the Lord is our goal.
Having something for a purpose means loving it above
all else.

The reason the aim determines whether a desire is real,
feigned, or deceitful is that our purpose is our very life.

What we live for—in other words, what we love—is what
we hold as our goal. When the welfare of our neighbor,
the larger community, the church, and the Lord’s kingdom forms our goal, our soul dwells in the Lord’s kingdom
and therefore in the Lord. The Lord’s kingdom is nothing
other than a kingdom of purposes and usefulness seeking the good of the whole human race. Even the angels
who attend us concern themselves only with our goals.
So far as our ultimate goal matches that of the Lord’s
kingdom, the angels delight in us and bind themselves to
us as their sisters or brothers. So far as we make ourselves
the ultimate goal, though, the angels withdraw and evil
spirits from hell move closer. The people in hell have no
other goal.

If you take the love away, there is no longer any intention, so there is no action.

The purposes we have are actually the different kinds of love we feel, because what we love, we hold as our purpose. And since the things we love constitute the core of our life, so do our goals.

This shows why our purpose determines our happiness
or unhappiness in the next life. The purpose is the core
of every cause. In fact, if the purpose is not present in the
cause—is not the all-in-all of the cause—it is not a cause.
The purpose is likewise the core of every effect, because
the effect stems from a purpose-dependent cause. As a
result, everything we have in us draws its existence from
our purpose. So in the other world we live in a state that
mirrors the state of our purpose.

The very purpose we love circumscribes our life and distinguishes us from others.

The purpose makes the person, and the nature of the purpose determines the nature of the person and therefore the nature of the person’s humanity after death.

Because angels love the Lord and share in that love with
others, they also possess all truth. As a result they possess
all wisdom and understanding, covering not only heavenly and spiritual subjects but also rational and earthly
ones. Love puts angels at the actual origins or source of
these things; that is, it makes angels aware of purposes
and causes. Love does this, because the Lord does it. To
see a thing in terms of its origins, or in terms of its purposes and causes, is to look from heaven at everything
below, even on earth.

The inmost recesses are where heavenly joy comes from.

When we gain our most profound joy, we are in our own heavenly joy; we cannot bear any deeper variety, which would only end up turning painful for us.

No one receives comfort from anything but what she or
he loves.

We are all distinguished from each other in the next life
according to our type of freedom. To put the same thing
another way, we are distinguished according to what we
love and desire. Consequently, we are distinguished according to the pleasures of our life, which is the same as
saying we are distinguished according to our life.

All of our freedom has our life at its center, because it has
our love at its center. Whatever we do out of love seems
free to us. Heavenly love is present within that freedom
when we force ourselves to resist evil and falsity and to
do good. At such a time, heavenly love is what the Lord
introduces into us and uses to create a sense of autonomy
in us. As a result, the Lord wants it to appear to us as if
we have true self-determination, even though we do not.
In the other world, the Lord takes this autonomy that we
have acquired through apparent self-compulsion during
the life of the body and fills it full of pleasure and happiness without limit. We also receive greater and greater
enlightenment. In fact, we come to believe firmly in the
truth of the idea that we have not really compelled ourselves at all, but that even the very smallest efforts of our
will came from the Lord. It becomes clear to us that the
purpose of our apparent independence was to enable us
to receive a new will from the Lord as our own and in this
way adopt a life of heavenly love. The Lord wants to share
what is his—and therefore what is heavenly—with every

single person. He wants it to feel as if it belongs to us and
resides in us, even though it does not. Angels have this
sense of ownership. The more sure they are of the truth
that everything good and true comes from the Lord, the
more pleasure and happiness they gain from this sense of
ownership.

The emotions involved in real love draw us out of our
bodily and worldly concerns, lifting our mind toward
heaven and freeing us from the restraints of time. Time
is an appearance we fall into when we reflect on things
we do not feel moved by or love—in other words, things
that are tedious.
When we are in a state of heavenly love or emotion, we
are in an angelic state. We seem to step outside of time

if there is no impatience in our mood. Impatience is a
bodily emotion, and the more we succumb to it, the more
we are trapped in time.

Neither time and the passage of time nor space and
extension in space can be used to describe our inner
depths, or our feelings and the thoughts they produce.
They do not exist in time or in a place, even though they
seem to do so, as far as our worldly senses can tell. Rather
they exist in inner dimensions corresponding to time
and place. These corresponding dimensions can only be
called states; there is no other word for them.