Tributes to Emanuel Swedenborg
“Swedenborg’s theocracy is sublime… He alone brings man into immediate communication with God.”
Honoré De Balzac (French novelist)
“Swedenborg… the works of this visionary… are the foundation for grand things.”
William Blake (English Poet and Artist)
“To my mind the only light that has been cast on the other life is found in Swedenborg’s philosophy.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (English Poet)
“Swedenborg was a man of great and indisputable cultivation, strong mathematical intellect, and the most pious, seraphic turn of mind; a man beautiful, lovable and tragical to me. More truths are confessed in Swedenborg’s writings than that of any other man. One of the loftiest minds in the realm of mind. One of the spiritual suns that will shine brighter as the years go on.”
Thomas Carlyle (Scottish essayist, historian, and moralist)
“As a moralist Swedenborg is above all praise.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian)
“My salvation and inspiration come from philosophy a little and religion a great deal, especially from the mystics ancient or modern theosophical. With them my load is lifted and I regain peace, courage, faith. Praise be to the God of Jesus, … of Swedenborg, of St. Paul.”
Alfred Deakin (Australia’s second Prime Minister)
“The great Swedish seer Emanuel Swedenborg has some claim to be the father of our new knowledge of supernal matters. When the first rays of the rising sun of spiritual knowledge fell upon the earth, they illuminated the greatest and highest human mind before they shed their light on lesser men. That great mountain peak of mentality was this great religious reformer.”
Arthur Conan Doyle (British writer and creator of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes)
“The most remarkable step in the religious history of recent ages is that made by the genius of Swedenborg. These truths passing out of his system into general circulation, are now met with every day, qualifying the views and creeds of all churches, and of men of no church. Swedenborg is one of the missoriums and mastodons of literature, not to be measured by whole colleges of ordinary scholars. . . Swedenborg is systematic and respective of the world in every sentence; a colossal soul who lies vast upon our times.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (American philosopher and poet)
“I am as much inclined as anyone to believe in a world beyond the visible, and I have enough poetic and vital drive that even my own constricted self expands to feel a Swedenborgian spirit world.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German poet and dramatist – Author of Faust)
“I admire Swedenborg as a great scientist and a great mystic at the same time. His life and work has always been of great interest to me and I read about seven fat volumes of his writings when I was a medical student.”
Carl Jung (Swiss Psychologist and Psychoanalyst)
“I acknowledge my profound indebtedness to Emanuel Swedenborg for a richer interpretation of the Bible, and a deeper understanding of Christianity, and a precious sense of the divine presence in the world. Swedenborg’s message has given colour and reality and unity to my thought of the life to come; it has exalted my ideas of love, truth, and usefulness; it has been my strongest incitement to overcome my limitations.”
Helen Keller (Blind, deaf American Author and Lecturer)
“All my teaching is founded on that of Hahnemann and of Swedenborg; their teachings correspond perfectly.”
James Tyler Kent (nineteenth-century physician, writer and proponent of modern day Homeopathy theory and practice)
“Swedenborg was one of the world’s great geniuses. With his rare intellect and deep spiritual insight he has much to contribute to our modern life.”
Dr Norman Vincent Peale (Author of The Power of Positive Thinking)
“In a world in which the voice of conscience too often seems still and small there is need of that spiritual leadership of which Swedenborg was a particular example.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt (32nd U.S. President)
“For you Westerners, it is Swedenborg who is your Buddha of the North.”
Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki (Japanese Author)
“Swedenborg . . . No one accepted life more fully, no one investigated it with a passion so great, with the same intellectual love, or with such impatience to learn about it.”
Jorge Luis Borges (South American Poet and Novelist)
“People who have had near-death experiences peek through the door of the afterlife, but Swedenborg explored the whole house.”
Kenneth Ring (Author and Founder of the International Association for Near Death Studies)
“Swedenborg was the first modern scientist to treat heaven as a real place, and the first to try to map it.”
Dr Eben Alexander (Author of Map of Heaven and Proof of Heaven)
“Continue to love me. Aye, let us love, as God would have us love one another, and let us realise, on earth, in spirit, what Swedenborg said when he saw in his vision in heaven, that man and wife there were melted into one angel.”
General William Booth (founder of The Salvation Army – in a published letter to his wife)
“I have the profoundest honour for the character and work of Emanuel Swedenborg. I have from time to time gained much from his writings.”
Rt. Rev. Phillips Brooks (Episcopalian Minister, writer of O Little Town of Bethlehem)
“To me, Swedenborg’s literature is an explanation of life – its meaning and purpose – which satisfies that something within us which we already know is only appealed to by the truth.”
Amelita Galli-Curci (Italian Soprano)
“Emanuel Swedenborg had the sanest and most far-reaching intellect this age has known . . . He grasped with clear and intellectual vision the seminal principles of things.”
Henry James, Sr. (American Philosopher)
“Swedenborg has become my Virgil. Swedenborg’s work is one of enormous compass and he has answered all my questions, however presumptuous they may have been. Disquiet soul, suffering heart ‘Take up and read’.”
Johann August Strindberg (Swedish novelist, dramatist and poet)
“It must be acknowledged that there is something very beautiful and healthy about the Swedenborgian Religion. The feeling of breezy health is the basic reason for its enduring popularity.”
Colin Wilson (English Philosopher and Writer)
His (Swedenborg’s) revelations look through all external and outward manifestations to inward realities; which regard all objects in the world of sense only as the types and symbols of the world of spirit; literally unmasking the universe and laying bare the profoundest mysteries of life.”
John Greenleaf Whittier (American Poet)
