Death and love are the two wings that bear the good man to

In the councils of elder wisdom, hear Michelangelo speak in a sentence feathered with light: “Death and love are the two wings that bear the good man to heaven.” In one stroke he marries opposites—the final hush and the first fire—and says they are not our enemies but our transport. The line is neither bleak nor sentimental. It teaches that a life rightly lived must learn to lean on both: on love, which lifts; on death, which loosens our grip on all that cannot last. Together they make the soul aerodynamic.

The meaning is double. First, love is a wing because it turns the self outward—toward God, neighbor, and the work we were born to do. A heart practiced in mercy grows light; it rises because it is uncluttered by envy, hoarding, or scorn. Second, death is a wing because it finishes the lesson love begins. It pares away pretense. It forces truth into the open: What did we give? Whom did we carry? What did we hope in beyond our own breath? For the good man, these questions do not condemn; they complete. The two wings move in rhythm: love teaches how to let go; death teaches what cannot be taken.

As for origin, the saying is widely traced to Michelangelo’s devotional verse—those grave, luminous poems from his later years, often written in the orbit of his friendship with Vittoria Colonna. In them he speaks the old language of pilgrimage: art as ladder, suffering as tutor, grace as air. The English form you know echoes that current—Renaissance piety distilled into an image a sculptor would trust: flight not by frenzy, but by balanced forces joined at the hinge of the heart.

A story makes the wisdom plain. Stand before the Pietà. A mother cradles her murdered son; marble remembers tenderness more faithfully than the living sometimes do. The scene is saturated with death—yet every curve is confession of love. That is why the sculpture lifts rather than crushes. The sorrow is not an anchor; it is a wing. From that stillness countless souls have felt themselves raised—toward compassion, toward contrition, toward a steadier gaze on the holy. Michelangelo’s chisel wrote the same theology as his line.

History offers another witness. In a hospital corridor after midnight, a nurse holds the hand of a stranger whose time is closing. She adjusts the sheet, whispers a prayer the patient cannot hear, and phones the daughter who is afraid to come. Love does what it can; death does what it must. When the daughter arrives, there are no speeches—only a long embrace, a forgiveness finally spoken, a hymn hummed through tears. In that small room, two wings beat together, and something heavy becomes light enough to carry.

Take the teaching as a rule for your days. Let love be practiced, not posed: schedule mercy as diligently as meetings—make the call, write the note, share the bread. And let death be remembered, not feared: keep short accounts, bless your heirs with clear words and clean papers, put right what you can while the sun is up. The ancients would say: trim your lamp. Michelangelo adds: also trim your feathers. A soul rises best when it travels with both wings.

Finally, some simple actions. Each morning, choose one deed of love that costs you—time, pride, or coin. Each evening, name one attachment you can release—resentment, vanity, needless clutter. Visit the sorrowing; honor the dead; tell the living what they mean to you while their ears can still receive it. In this way, when death comes as every teacher comes, it will find your second wing ready, and the heaven you have been leaning toward all along will not feel foreign, but like arriving after a long, faithful flight.