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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:

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds.

Francis Pharcellus Church Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus (1897)

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

Edna St. Vincent Millay Sonnet XXX from Fatal Interview (1931)

Christmas turns everything upside down. This is the central truth of the incarnation — "Immanuel, God with us." The upside of heaven come down to earth. "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, . . . full of grace and truth." Men miss the entire meaning of Jesus when they see in him the highest upreach of man; he is God reaching down and making common cause with man's struggle. The meaning of Christmas puts down the mighty things in men's minds from their seats — place, riches, talents — and exalts the things of low degree — humility, simplicity, and trust.

Halford E. Luccock Fares, Please! (1915)

Love will come find you
Just to remind you
Of who you are
[...] See that's the thing about love
[...] Then life
It will embrace you
Totally amaze you
So you don't give up

Alicia Keys

Truth is cosmically total: synergetic. Verities are generalized principles stated in semimetaphorical terms. Verities are differentiable. But love is omniembracing, omnicoherent, and omni-inclusive, with no exceptions. Love, like synergetics, is nondifferentiable, i.e., is integral.

Buckminster Fuller Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975)

Now out upon you, Christmas !
Is this the merry time
When the red hearth blazed, the harper sung,
And the bells rung their glorious chime ? . . .

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

In that film Love Story, there’s a line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. Love means saying you’re sorry every day for some little thing or other.

Ray Bradbury The Paris Review interview (2010)

To know me is to love me. This cliche is popular for a reason, because most of us, I imagine, believe deep in our hearts that if anyone truly got to know us, they'd truly get to love us - or at least know why we're the way we are. The problem in life, maybe the central problem, is that so few people ever seem to have sufficient curiosity to do the job on us that we know we deserve.

Roger Ebert

Ask not of me, love, what is love?
Ask what is good of God above;
Ask of the great sun what is light;
Ask what is darkness of the night;
Ask sin of what may be forgiven;
Ask what is happiness of heaven;
Ask what is folly of the crowd;
Ask what is fashion of the shroud;
Ask what is sweetness of thy kiss;
Ask of thyself what beauty is.

Philip James Bailey Festus (1813)

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,
'Tis woman's whole existence: man may range
The court, camp, church, the vessel, and the mart,
Sword, gown, gain, glory, offer in exchange
Pride, fame, ambition, to fill up his heart,
And few there are whom these cannot estrange;
Men have all these resources, we but one,
To love again, and be again undone.

Lord Byron

Great men,
Till they have gained their ends, are giants in
Their promises, but, those obtained, weak pigmies
In their performance. And it is a maxim
Allowed among them, so they may deceive,
They may swear anything; for the queen of love,
As they hold constantly, does never punish,
But smile, at lovers' perjuries.

Philip Massinger

Love is all in fire, and yet is ever freezing;
Love is much in winning, yet is more in leesing:
Love is ever sick, and yet is never dying;
Love is ever true, and yet is ever lying;
Love does doat in liking, and is mad in loathing;
Love indeed is anything, yet indeed is nothing.

Thomas Middleton

And when my own Mark Antony
Against young Cæsar strove,
And Rome's whole world was set in arms,
The cause was,—all for love.

Robert Southey

It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas, though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and Mankind.

H. P. Lovecraft

In so far as men are influenced by envy or any kind of hatred, one towards another, they are at variance, and are therefore to be feared in proportion, as they are more powerful than their fellows.
Yet minds are not conquered by force, but by love and high-mindedness.

Baruch Spinoza

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy if anything can.

Thomas Merton

'and liars kill their kind
but' her,my 'love creates love only' our

E. E. Cummings

no evil is
so worse than worst you fall in hate with love
—human one mortally immortal i
can turn immense all time's because to why

E. E. Cummings

One thing is sure, O comrades, that the love
That fights to keep us rooted in the earth,
But also urges us to dare the stars,
This irresistible, this ancient power
Wedged in the soul, unshakable, is the light
That burns our roots and leaves us free for Space.

Philip José Farmer Sestina of the Space Rocket (1953)

We will not go to Heaven,Goetz, and even if we both entered it, we would not have eyes to see each other, nor hands to touch each other. Up there, God gets all the attention.... We can only love on this earth and against God.

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

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