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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:

I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.

Jean-Paul Sartre The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov (1879)

...the madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings...

Plato

Love is the only thing that will save us, independent of any mistakes we may make. Love is always stronger.

Paulo Coelho Aleph (2011)

In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.

Mary Renault The Mask of Apollo (1966)

The light
Begin to bleed,
Begin to breathe,
Begin to speak.
D'you know what?
I love you better now.

Kate Bush

Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.

Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957)

For none can express thee, though all should approve thee.
I love thee so, Dear, that I only can love thee.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Behold me! I am worthy
Of thy loving, for I love thee!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

My Lesbia, let us live and love.

Catullus

I hate and I love. Why do I do so you perhaps ask.
I cannot say; but I feel it to be so, and I am tormented accordingly.

Catullus

Alas! for love, if thou art all,
And nought beyond, O earth.

Felicia Hemans

What's our baggage? Only vows,
Happiness, and all our care,
And the flower that sweetly shows
Nestling lightly in your hair.

Victor Hugo

When late I attempted your pity to move,
Why seemed you so deaf to my prayers?
Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love
But—why did you kick me downstairs?

John Philip Kemble

Ah! what avails it me the flocks to keep,
Who lost my heart while I preserv'd my sheep.

Alexander Pope

I was not yet in love, yet I loved to love...I sought what I might love, in love with loving.

Augustine of Hippo Confessions (397)

If you want to be loved, be lovable.

Ovid

Were it not for the shepherds, there would have been no reception. And were it not for a group of stargazers, there would have been no gifts.

Max Lucado

Soul of fibre and heart of oak.

Miguel de Cervantes

That's love too. It ain't sex, and maybe that's too bad, but you know, Cindy, when a man and a woman care for each other, that doesn't always mean they have to sleep together or live together.

Orson Scott Card Homebody (1998)

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