quotations about angels
Entertaining angels unawares: It is always we who are to entertain the angels, and never they us. I cannot, however, think that an angel would be a very entertaining person, either as guest or host.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Notebooks
[Angels] aid us in our personal mission. We have to learn to listen, for if we block the angels out, they become only the fairy beings of dreams and pleasant stories.
SILVER RAVENWOLF
Angels
Good angels are fallible ... they sin every day and fall from Heaven like flies.
ANATOLE FRANCE
The Revolt of the Angels
When the Angels arrive, the devils leave.
EGYPTIAN PROVERB
Man is a mixed being, made up of a spiritual soul and of a fleshly body; the angels are pure spirits, herein nearer to God, only that they are created and finite in all respects, free from decay, free from the power of death, whereas God is infinite and uncreated.
J. C. HARE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Angels are manifestations, unquestionably real to those who encounter them, of a world larger, better, and infinitely more beautiful, intelligent, and anchored in the reality of God than ours is. The existence of angels drives home the fact that we are not lost and alone in this modern flatland of materialism, but come from, and will return to, another, better place.
PTOLEMY TOMPKINS & TYLER BEDDOES
Proof of Angels: The Definitive Book on the Reality of Angels and the Surprising Role They Play in Each of Our Lives
This is the state of all creatures, whether men or angels; as they make not themselves, so they enjoy nothing from themselves; if they are great, it must be only as great receivers of the gifts of God; their power can only be so much of the divine power acting in them; their wisdom can be only so much of the divine wisdom shining within them; and their light and glory, only so much of the light and glory of God shining upon them.
WILLIAM LAW
A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life
The angels must often be astonished at us and think we are the strangest creatures that well can be, yet they love us, and therefore they take a great interest in that Gospel that promotes our highest good.
CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON
Spurgeon's Sermons on Angels
The angels may have wider spheres of action, may have nobler forms of duty, but right with them and with us is one and the same thing.
EDWIN HUBBELL CHAPIN
Living Words
Angels never attack, as infernal spirits do. Angels only ward off and defend.
EMANUEL SWEDENBORG
Arcana Coelestia
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
But all God's angels come to us disguised: sorrow and sickness, poverty and death, one after other lift their frowning masks, and we behold the Seraph's face beneath, all radiant with the glory and the calm of having looked upon the front of God.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"On the Death of a Friend's Child"
Nobody's perfect. We're all just one step up from the beasts and one step down from the angels.
JEANNETTE WALLS
Half Broke Horses
When I was a child and heard about angels, I was both frightened and fascinated by the thought of these enormous, invisible presences in our midst. I conceived of them not as white-robed androgynes with yellow locks and thick gold wings, which was how my friend Matty Wilson had described them to me--Matty was the predecessor of all sorts of arcane knowledge--but as big, dark, blundering men, massive in their weightlessness, given to pranks and ponderous play, who might knock you over, or break you in half, without meaning to. When a child from Miss Molyneaux's infant school in Carrickdrum fell under the hoofs of a dray-horse one day and was trampled to death, I, a watchful six year old, knew who was to blame; I pictured his guardian angel standing over the child's crushed form with his big hands helplessly extended, not sure whether to be contrite or to laugh.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
Around our pillows golden ladders rise, and up and down the skies, with winged sandals shod, the angels come, and go, the Messengers of God!
R. H. STODDARD
Hymn to the Beautiful
Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure and are awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Each single angel is terrifying.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Duino Elegies
Angels are winged with God's power.
SOLON
attributed, Day's Collacon
Make friends with the angels, who though invisible are always with you.... Often invoke them, constantly praise them, and make good use of their help and assistance in all your temporal and spiritual affairs.
ST. FRANCIS DE SALES
Introduction to the Devout Life
Angels boast ethereal vigor, and are formed from seeds of heavenly birth.
VIRGIL
attributed, Day's Collacon
The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
First Inaugural Address, Mar. 4, 1861