angels

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
The bed be blest that I lie on.
Four angels to my bed.
Four angels round my head,
One to watch, and one to pray,
And two to bear my soul away.
- - - - Thomas Ady "A Candle in the Dark"

A fool without fear is sometimes wiser than an angel with fear.
- - - - Lady Nancy Astor "My Two Countries"

Though in the order of nature angels rank above men, yet, by scale of justice, good men are of greater value than bad angels.
- - - - Saint Augustine

The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall.
- - - - Francis Bacon

I want to be an angel,
And with the angels stand
A crown upon my forehead,
A harp within my hand.
- - - - Urania Locke Bailey

To the most lovely, the most dear,
The Angel, and the deathless grail
Who fill my heart with radiance clear -
In immortality all hail.
- - - - Charles Baudelaire

We stand awkward between the earthloving beast and the cool, hot electronic angel.
- - - - Greg Bear

Angels - All the people who worshipped God on earth and like meant it get to be angels. That means they get to fly around and play old time guitars and stuff. But what sucks is that only God and Jesus and his like roadies get to have beards and stuff. It's like ZZ Top's family or something.
- - - - From "Beavis And Butt-head Ensucklopedia"

See I am sending an angel ahead of you to guard you along the way.
- - - - Bible - Exodus 23:20

There is joy in the presence of the angels.
- - - - Bible - Luke 15:10

We should not forget to entertain strangers, lest we entertain angels unaware.
- - - - Bible - Hebrews 13:2

Man was created a little lower than the angels, and has been getting lower ever since.
- - - - Josh Billings

As I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity, I collected some of their Proverbs.
- - - - William Blake

For the tear is an intellectual thing,
And a sigh is the sword of an Angel King;
And the bitter groan of a martyr's woe
As an arrow from the Almighty's bow.
- - - - William Blake "The Gray Monk"

It is not because angels are holier than men or devils that makes them angels, but because they do not expect holiness from one another, but from God alone.
- - - - William Blake

The Angel that presided o'er my birth
Said, "Little creature, formed of joy and mirth,
Go love without the help of any thing on earth.
- - - - William Blake "The Angel That Presided"

My delight and thy delight
Walking, like two angels white,
In the gardens of the night.
- - - - Robert Bridges

The angel of death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings.
- - - - John Bright

Think, in mounting higher,
The angels would press on us, and aspire
To drop some golden orb of perfect song
Into our deep, dear silence.
- - - - Elizabeth Barrett Browning"Sonnet XXII"

Unless you can love, as the angels may,
With the breadth of heaven betwixt you;
Unless you can dream that his faith is fast,
Through behoving and unbeloving;
Unless you can die when the dream is past--
Oh, never call it loving!
- - - - Robert Browning

The Angels were all singing out of tune,
And hoarse with having little else to do,
Excepting to wind up the sun and moon
Or curb a runaway young star or two.
- - - - George Gordon, Lord Byron

What though my winged hours of bliss have been,
Like angel visits, few and far between.
- - - - Thomas Campbell "Pleasures of Hope"

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
- - - - Thomas Carlyle

We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.
- - - - Anton Chekhov

The reason angels can fly is because they take themselves lightly.
- - - - G. K. Chesterton "Orthodoxy"

Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of the character, though few can decipher even fragments of their meaning.
- - - - Lydia M. Child

I feel that there is an angel inside me whom I am constantly shocking.
- - - - Jean Cocteau

If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil.
- - - - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A pillow for thee will I bring,
Stuffed with down of angel's wing.
- - - - Richard Crashaw

Angels descending, bring from above,
Echoes of mercy, whispers of love.
- - - - Fanny J. Crosby

Jealousy is the sister of love, as the Devil is the brother of angels.
- - - - Marie-François de Beauveau

We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another.
- - - - Luciano de Crescenzo

To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.
- - - - Alphonse Marie de Lamartine

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.
- - - - Saint Francis de Sales

Make yourself familiar with the angels and behold them frequently in spirit; for without being seen, they are present with you.
- - - - Saint Francis de Sales

The devil is an angel too.
- - - - Miguel de Unamuno

We trust in plumed procession
For such the angels go--
Rank after Rank, with even feet--
And uniforms of Snow.
- - - - Emily Dickinson

The question is this: Is man an ape or an angel? I am on the side of the angels.
- - - - Benjamin Disraeli (Speech, Nov. 25, 1864)

Twice or thrice I loved thee
Before I knew thy face or name
So in a voice, so in shapeless flame,
Angels affect us oft, and worshipped be
- - - - John Donne "Air and Angels"

All the Utopias will come to pass only when we grow wings and all people are converted into angels.
- - - - Fedor Dostoevsky "The Diary of a Writer"

The soul at its highest is found like God, but an angel gives a closer idea of Him. That is all an angel is: an idea of God.
- - - - Meister Eckhart

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
- - - - George Elliot

He who loves goodness harbors angels, reveres reverence, and lives with God.
- - - - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Pride ruined the angels.
- - - - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether their be any who understand it or not.
- - - - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The man, who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world.
- - - - Ralph Waldo Emerson

There was a pause - just long enough for an angel to pass, flying slowly.
- - - - Ronald Firbank "Vainglory"

It is dangerous to confuse children with angels.
- - - - David Fyfe

Every time you hear a bell ring, it means that some angel's just got his wings.
- - - - Frances Goodrich and Frank Capra "It's a Wonderful Life"

Earth has one angel less and heaven one more, since yesterday.
- - - - Nathaniel Hawthorne

He mourns that day so soon has glided by:
E'en like the passage of an angel's tear
That falls through the clear ether silently
- - - - John Keats

Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.
- - - - John Keats

A fine thing to be talking about angels in this day when common thieves smash the holy rosaries of their victims in the street...
- - - - Jack Kerouac "Desolation Angels"

The sin, both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave them free will.
- - - - C. S. Lewis "Miracles"

We were made to be neither cerebral men nor visceral men, but Men. Not beasts nor angels but Men - things at once rational and animal.
- - - - C. S. Lewis "The Pilgrim's Regress"

I am the Angel of the Sun
Whose flaming wheels began to run
When God 's almighty breath
Said to the darkness and the Night,
Let there be light! and there was light.
- - - - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

He spake well who said that graves are the footprints of angels.
- - - - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
- - - - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow "Evangeline"

If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.
- - - - Richard Lovelace

All God's angels come to us disguised.
- - - - James Russell Lowell

I saw the angel in the marble and I just chiseled until I set him free.
- - - - Michelangelo

Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth.
- - - - John Milton "Paradise Lost"

Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.
- - - - John Milton "Paradise Lost"

O welcome, pure-eyed Faith, white-handed Hope,
Thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings!
- - - - John Milton "Comus"

In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.
- - - - Herman Melville "Moby Dick"

A beautiful death is for people who have lived like animals to die like angels.
- - - - Mother Teresa

Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and the angels know of us.
- - - - Thomas Paine

Do I not deal with angels
When her lips I touch.
- - - - Kenneth Patchen

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
- - - - Saint Paul

I saw the tracks of angels in the earth,
The beauty of heaven walking by itself on the world.
- - - - Petrarch

And neither the angels in Heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the Beautiful Annabel Lee.
- - - - Edgar Allan Poe "Annabel Lee"

There are nine orders of angels, to wit, angels, archangels, virtues, powers, principalities, dominations, thrones, cherubim, and seraphim.
- - - - Pope Gregory The Great

An angel of Paradise, no less, is always beside me, wrapped in everlasting ecstasy on his Lord. So I am ever under the gaze of an angel who protects and prays for me.
- - - - Pope John XXIII

Ambition ... The glorious fault of angels and of gods.
- - - - Alexander Pope

Men would be angels, angels would be gods.
- - - - Alexander Pope

It may be that Death's bright angel
Will speak in that chord again, -
It may be that only in Heaven
I shall hear that grand Amen.
- - - - Adelaide Anne Proctor "A Lost Chord"

The guardian angels of life fly so high as to be beyond our sight, but they are always looking down upon us.
- - - - Jean Paul Richter

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
And even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
Which we are just able to endure,
And we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
- - - - Rainer Maria Rilke

Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have always known it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.
- - - - Tom Robbins

Time is man's angel.
- - - - Johann Friedrich von Schiller

A man does not have to be an angel in order to be saint.
- - - - Albert Schweitzer

It came upon the midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth
To touch their harps of gold:
"Peace on earth, good will to men
From Heaven's all - gracious King" -
The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels sing.
- - - - Edmund Hamilton Sears "The Angels' Song"

An angel; or, if not,
An earthly paragon.
- - - - William Shakespeare "Cymbeline"

Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.
- - - - William Shakespeare "Macbeth"

Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
- - - - William Shakespeare "Hamlet"

O, speak again, bright angel, for thou art
As glorious to this night, beign o'er my head,
As is a winged messenger of heaven
Unto the white-upturned wond'ring eyes
Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him,
When he bestrides the lazy puffing clouds,
And sails upon the bosom of the air.
- - - - William Shakespeare "Romeo and Juliet"

O, what man may within him hide,
Though angel on the outward side!
- - - - William Shakespeare "Measure for Measure"

In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
- - - - George Bernard Shaw

God and all angels sing the world to sleep,
Now that the moon is rising in the heat
And crickets are loud again in the grass. The moon
Burns in the mind on lost remembrances.
- - - - Wallace Stevens "The Men That Are Falling"

Every blade of grass has an angel that bends over it and whispers, ''grow! grow!''
- - - - The Talmud

To wish to act like angels while we are still in this world is nothing but folly.
- - - - Saint Theresa of Avila

The angels keep their ancient places; --
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
It's you, it's your estranged faces,
That miss the many-splendored thing.
- - - - Francis Thompson

I have been on the verge of being an angel all my life, but it's never happened yet.
- - - - Mark Twain "An Autobiography"

When one has tasted watermelon he knows what the angels eat.
- - - - Mark Twain

It is not known precisely where angels dwell--whether in the air, the void, or the planets. It has not been God's pleasure that we should be informed of their abode.
- - - - Voltaire

I'm no angel, but I've spread my wings a bit.
- - - - Mae West

Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
- - - - Richard Purdy Wilbur

I will not wish thee riches, nor the glow of greatness,
but that wherever thou go some weary heart shall gladden at thy smile,
or shadowed life know sunshine for a while.
And so thy path shall be a track of light,
like angels' footsteps passing through the night.
- - - - (words on a church wall in Upwaltham England)

A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a Spirit still, and bright
With something of angelic light
- - - - William Wordsworth "She Was a Phantom of Delight"

An angel's arm can't snatch me from the grave; legions of angels can't confine me there.
- - - - Edward Young