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Christmas Quotes

Most of the quotes on this page are not about Christmas at all. We built it from the pages on family, love and gratitude, which is what people tend to want for a card or a toast.

That makes it a long list, ordered by quality rather than by how seasonal each entry feels. If you want something that sounds like Christmas, search for it. If you want something that would be true at any family table, start here.

Random quote on Christmas

Most quoted on christmas:

Love is like the measles; we can't have it bad but once, and the later in life we have it the tougher it goes with us.

Josh Billings Affurisms. From Josh Billings: His Sayings (1865)

He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,
And mocks my loss of liberty.

William Blake Poetical Sketches (1783)

They suppose that Woman's Love is Sin; in consequence all the Loves & Graces with them are Sin.

William Blake Annotations to Lavater (1788)

They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.

Arundhati Roy The God of Small Things (1997)

As soon as the soul has been made to perceive that a thing can conduct it to that which it loves supremely, it must inevitably embrace it with joy.

Blaise Pascal

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it...

George Eliot The Mill on the Floss (1860)

We step not over the threshold of childhood till led by Love

Letitia Elizabeth Landon Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

I know not which is the most fatal gift,
Genius or Love, for both alike are ruled
By stars of bright aspect and evil influence.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Oh, nothing has the memory of love!

Letitia Elizabeth Landon The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

To know yourself less beloved than you love, is a dreadful feeling

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

[...] the love of power excludes all others.

Indro Montanelli

Hardly we find the path of love, to sink the self, forget the "I,"
When sad suspicion grips the heart, when Man, the Man begins to die

Richard Francis Burton The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)

I obey Thee Lord, first for the love I ought, in all reason to bear Thee; secondly for that Thou canst shorten or prolong the lives of men.

Leonardo da Vinci The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883)

I love to write and I assure you I write regularly... But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.

J. D. Salinger Interview in The Baton Rouge Advocate (1980)

When he loved his bride it was not a queen he loved, but rather the girl as she might have been if she had not been destroyed in her childhood.

Orson Scott Card Hart's Hope (1983)

Love is random; fear is inevitable.

Orson Scott Card Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (1996)

You're the only one that I would be glad to be close to forever, because all your secrets are bright and good and I love you for them.

Orson Scott Card Earthfall (1995)

I will never say the things that I want to say to you. I know the damage it would do. I love you more than I hate my loneliness and pain.

Henry Rollins Solipsist (1998)

Blue Moon,
Now I'm no longer alone,
Without a dream in my heart,
Without a love of my own.

Lorenz Hart Blue Moon (1934)

[I]n words lie the seeds of all dissension, and love at its most profound is silent.

Hilaire Belloc A Conversation with a Cat, and Others (1931)

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