In the Koran, Allah asks, "The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?" It's a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms?… If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest?

About Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard (née Doak; April 30, 1945 – September 15, 2026) was an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and nonfiction. She published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 book Pilgrim at Tinker...

More quotations from Annie Dillard

If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.

—Annie Dillard

money poverty thrift

I don't think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular… but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive.

—Annie Dillard

purity wildness

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.

—Annie Dillard

energy sunlight wind

If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be too cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

—Annie Dillard

love cynicism intellect nonsense affairs

Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.

—Annie Dillard

success vision aim

More quotations tagged with “heaven”

Heaven lent you a soul, Earth will lend a grave.

—Christian Nestell Bovee

soul death earth heaven

Moses sees the bush as it actually is.… All that is living burns. This is the fundamental fact of nature. And Moses saw it with his own two eyes directly. That glimpse of the real world—of the world as it is known to God—is not a world of isolated things but of processes in concert. God tells Moses, "Take off your shoes, because the ground where you are standing is holy ground." He is asking Moses to experience in his own body what the burning bush experiences: a living connection between heaven and earth, the life that stretches out like taffy between our father the sun and our mother the earth. If you do not believe this, take off your shoes and stand in the grass or in the sand or in the dirt.

—William Bryant Logan

God experience nature earth heaven

Every charitable act is a stepping stone toward heaven.

—Henry Ward Beecher

heaven charity

The miracle on earth are the laws of heaven.

—Jean Paul

laws earth heaven

A happy family is but an earlier heaven.

—George Bernard Shaw

happiness family heaven

History

8 Nov 2015 Added
26 Oct 2026 Wording changed

Previous wording

In the Koran, Allah asks, "The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?" It's a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? . . . If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest?