“Death is an angel with two faces:
To us he turns
A face of terror, blighting all things fair;
The other burns
With glory of the stars, and love is there.”

— Theodore Chickering Williams

A Thanatopsis, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Death is an angel with two faces: To us he turns A face of terror, blighting all things fair; The other burns With …" by Theodore Chickering Williams?

Theodore Chickering Williams photo

Theodore Chickering Williams 2

American hymnwriter 1855–1915

Related quotes

“Her face was fair and pretty, with eyes like two bits of night sky, each with a star dissolved in the blue.”

George MacDonald book The Princess and the Goblin

Source: The Princess and the Goblin

“Almost every organization… exhibits two faces — a smiling face which it turns toward its members and a frowning face which it turns to the world outside.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1950s, The Organizational Revolution: A study in the ethics of economic organization, 1953, p. 10 as cited in: Joseph T. Mahoney & Anne S. Huff (1993) Toward a New Social Contract. Theory in Organization Science https://ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/30105/towardnewsocialc93136maho.pdf?sequence=2 Faculty paper, University of Illinois at Urbana

“The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.”

Francis Thompson (1859–1907) British poet

St. 4.
The Kingdom of God http://www.bartleby.com/236/245.html (1913)

“Victory over self will not lead us to glory. It is only a postponement of destruction. There is no lasting victory except for those who have faced and defeated death.”

Titon Rahmawan

“[Recounting a scene in The Gunfighter] Turn him loose, let him go, let him say he outdrew me fair and square — I want him to feel what it's like to every moment face his death.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Knocked Out Loaded (1986), Brownsville Girl (with Sam Shepard)

“To the people of New York, Paris, or London, "death" is a word that is never pronounced because it burns the lips. The Mexican, however, frequents it, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and most steadfast love. Of course, in his attitude perhaps there is as much fear as there is in one of the others; at least he does not hide it; he confronts it face to face with patience, disdain, or irony.”

Octavio Paz book The Labyrinth of Solitude

The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)

“I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: Henry & June

“And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.”

Plato (-427–-347 BC) Classical Greek philosopher

211
The Symposium

“Is it fair your life burns so short and bright? Death had asked.

"No such thing as fair," Frank told himself. "If I'm going to burn, it might as well be bright.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

“Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart.”

Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) Italian dramatist, novelist, short story writer, and poet, Nobel Prize for Literature laureate

Source: Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays

Related topics