quotations about angels
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth -- unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.
JOHN MILTON
Paradise Lost
Lord, give Thine angels every day / Command to guard us on our way / And bid them every evening keep / Their watch around us while we sleep / So shall no wicked thing draw near / To do us harm or cause us fear / And we shall dwell, when life is past / With angels round Thy throne at last.
JOHN M. NEALE
Hymns for Children
In this dim world of clouding cares, we rarely know, till 'wildered eyes see white wings lessening up the skies, the Angels with us unawares.
GERALD MASSEY
The Ballad of Babe Christabel
I am apt to think, if we knew what it was to be an angel for one hour, we should return to this world, though it were to sit on the brightest throne in it, with vastly more loathing and reluctance than we would now descend into a loathsome dungeon or sepulchre.
GEORGE BERKELEY
The Works of George Berkeley
When angels visit earth, the messengers
Of God's decree, they come as lightning, wind:
Before the throne, they all are living fire.
EMMA LAZARUS
"The Birth of Man: A Legend of the Talmud"
If angels rarely appear, it's because we all too often mistake the medium for the Message.
EILEEN ELIAS FREEMAN
The Angels' Little Instruction Book: Learning from God's Heavenly Messengers
If angels stoop from visions of more than earthly beauty to spells of less than earthly worth, they are but fallen angels, mingling divine utterances with the babblings of madness, and the madness is not the divineness.
EDWIN HUBBELL CHAPIN
Living Words
But angels come to lead frail minds to rest in chaste desires, on heavenly beauty bound. You frame my thoughts, and fashion me within; you stop my tongue, and teach my heart to speak.
EDMUND SPENSER
Amoretti
The death of God left the angels in a strange position. They were overtaken suddenly by a fundamental question. One can attempt to imagine the moment. How did they look at the instant the question invaded them, flooding the angelic consciousness, taking hold with terrifying force? The question was, "What are angels?" New to questioning, unaccustomed to terror, unskilled in aloneness, the angels (we assume) fell into despair.
DONALD BARTHELME
"On Angels"
Don't be on the side of the angels, it's too lowering.
D.H. LAWRENCE
letter to Rolf Gardiner, Dec. 18, 1927
For truly we are all angels temporarily hiding as humans.
BRIAN L. WEISS
Miracles Happen: The Transformational Healing Power of Past-Life Memories
Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Macbeth
How do the angels get to sleep when the devil leaves the porch light on?
TOM WAITS
"Mr. Siegal", Heartattack and Vine
Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.
MILAN KUNDERA
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Life is a tapestry: We are the warp; angels, the weft; God, the weaver. Only the Weaver sees the whole design.
EILEEN ELIAS FREEMAN
The Angels' Little Instruction Book: Learning from God's Heavenly Messengers
Angels have very nasty tempers. Especially when they're feeling righteous.
CLIVE BARKER
Mister B. Gone
All this bit about angels and all the different religions, it's based on something. I think anything's possible. I believe in everything until it's disproved.
JOHN LENNON
attributed, The Revolutionary Artist: John Lennon's Radical Years
Angels shine from without because their spirits are lit from within by the light of God.
EILEEN ELIAS FREEMAN
The Angels' Little Instruction Book: Learning from God's Heavenly Messengers
Man is his own star, and the soul that can render an honest and a perfect man commands all light, all influence, all fate. Nothing to him falls early, or too late. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
JOHN FLETCHER
The Honest Man's Fortune
How great an evil, then, is pride! It overcast, in a moment, all the beautiful and eternal prospects, it eclipsed, in a moment, all the splendour, virtue, and dignity of Angels.
TIMOTHY DWIGHT
Theology Explained and Defended