quotations about angels
For truly we are all angels temporarily hiding as humans.
BRIAN L. WEISS
Miracles Happen: The Transformational Healing Power of Past-Life Memories
The very names assigned to angels by their Creator, convey to us ideas pre-eminently pleasing, fitted to captivate the heart, and exalt the imagination; ideas which dispel gloom, banish despondency, enliven hope, and awaken sincere and unmingled joy.
TIMOTHY DWIGHT
Theology Explained and Defended
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
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
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
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
Songs of praise the angels sang, Heav'n with alleluias rang, when creation was begun, when God spoke and it was done.
JAMES MONTGOMERY
"Songs of Praise the Angels Sang"
When the Angels arrive, the devils leave.
EGYPTIAN PROVERB
Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Macbeth
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
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 trendiness of angels with the public at large waxes and wanes, but in our time, the big surge of interest in angels began in the early 1990s. Suddenly these beings, which previously had shown up now and then in movies and TV but mostly on cards at Christmas and disappeared for the rest of the year, were everywhere. Why was this? The short answer is that there is something about angels that makes it impossible for people to forget about them for too long. There may be phases during which they sink out of sight, yet those phases always end eventually, and the figure of the angel reemerges, interpreted through the lens of the time in which they have appeared back into the light of human interest.
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
We should, can and most of the time do communicate with God directly. To my knowledge, angels are not necessary for anything. But God's creation is abundant, and asking "Why angels?" would be like asking why there are thousands of varieties of trees or stars, when we could get along with so much less. God Himself told us many times that He was sending angels to love and care for us, so He is the one who brought them into our lives. Therefore, even if we don't understand their entire purpose, I vote that we pay attention to them.
JOAN WESTER ANDERSON
interview, Belief Net
When God sends his angel to the soul it becomes the one who knows for sure.
MEISTER ECKHART
Sermon 9, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church
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
How do the angels get to sleep when the devil leaves the porch light on?
TOM WAITS
"Mr. Siegal", Heartattack and Vine
We all are men, in our own natures frail, and capable of our flesh; few are angels.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Henry VIII
Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.
G. K. CHESTERTON
"The Eternal Revolution", Orthodoxy
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
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"