ANGEL QUOTES IV
quotations about angels
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"
Cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from ye door.
WILLIAM BLAKE
"Holy Thursday"
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
Angels boast ethereal vigor, and are formed from seeds of heavenly birth.
VIRGIL
attributed, Day's Collacon
How do the angels get to sleep when the devil leaves the porch light on?
TOM WAITS
"Mr. Siegal", Heartattack and Vine
There are nine orders of angels, to wit, angels, archangels, virtues, powers, principalities, dominations, thrones, cherubim, and seraphim.
GREGORY THE GREAT
Homilies
We are not alone in our struggles. We have help from beyond. Sometimes such help is wondrously manifested in encounters we cannot rationally explain. Sometimes such help is mysteriously conveyed through the hands and hearts of those we meet in the flesh. A corollary underpinning is like unto the first: Whether we recognize it or not, God wills good for all human beings. The key, of course, is whether we welcome the help and the holy intention.
DUKE TUFTY
"Voices of Faith: Does everyone have a guardian angel, even bad people?", Kansas City Star, March 4, 2016
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
The greatest thing we can learn from the holy angels is their instant, unquestioning obedience to God's command.
PETER NWARU
"Existence of Angels: What Christians believe", National Mirror, February 28, 2016
For God will deign to visit oft the dwellings of just men -- delighted, and with frequent intercourse -- thither will send his winged messengers on errants of supernal grace.
JOHN MILTON
Paradise Lost
Six wings he wore, to shade his lineaments divine; the pair that clad each shoulder broad, came mantling o'er his breast with regal ornament; the middle pair girt like a starry zone his waist, and round skirted his loins and thighs with downy gold, and colours dipp'd in heaven; the third his feet shadow'd from either heel with feather'd mail, sky-tinctur'd grain.
JOHN MILTON
Paradise Lost
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
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
Insight is better than eyesight when it comes to seeing an angel.
EILEEN ELIAS FREEMAN
The Angels' Little Instruction Book: Learning from God's Heavenly Messengers
Be an angel to someone else whenever you can, as a way of thanking God for the help your angel has given you.
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
Good angels are fallible ... they sin every day and fall from Heaven like flies.
ANATOLE FRANCE
The Revolt of the Angels
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
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
For what is it that angels do? They bring us good news. They open our eyes to moments of wonder, to lovely possibilities, to exemplary people, to the idea that God is here in our midst. They lift our hearts and give us wings.
JOAN WESTER ANDERSON
Where Angels Walk