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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:

What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?

Sylvia Plath Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices (1962)

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
I loved light ever, light in eye and brain —
No tapers mirrored in long palace floors,
Nor dedicated depths of silent aisles,
But just the common dusty wind-blown day
That roofs earth's millions.

Edith Wharton Vesalius in Zante (1564)

In love affairs, there is no mediator like a merry, simple-hearted child — ever ready to cement divided hearts, to span the unfriendly gulf of custom, to melt the ice of cold reserve, and overthrow the separating walls of dread formality and pride.

Anne Brontë The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

Somewhere In Time is the story of a love which transcends time, What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death. ... I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form.

Richard Matheson

Love is just another means of manipulation. We can use that emotion like we use hatred and fear.

John Twelve Hawks Fourth Realm Trilogy (2005)

I wanted the basic needs of human existence—satiation of hunger, good health, love—to take on the shapes of small fruits we could plant and harvest. But who would be the plantation owners, and who the harvesters?

Jaroslav Kalfař Spaceman of Bohemia (2017)

Thy love hath taken me from me; Thou, Thou art needed by me.
Day and night do I burn; Thou, Thou art needed by me.
Were they to slay me, let them winnow my ashes into the heavens.
There let my dust cry, "Thou, Thou art needed by me."

Yunus Emre

If we only have love
Then tomorrow will dawn
And the days of our years
Will rise on that morn.

Rod McKuen If We Only Have Love (1968)

There is only one thing that can form a bond between men, and that is gratitude...we cannot give someone else greater power over us than we have ourselves.

Montesquieu Lettres Persanes (1721)

Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.

George Eliot Adam Bede (1859)

Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled.

Harlan Ellison Title of book (1968)

Somewhere around the world someone would love to have my first world problems

Matthew Good

It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get.

Morarji Desai

How do I love thee?
Let me count the days.
If there are 50 ways to leave your lover
then there are 50 ways to be left.

Sheri-D Wilson Goddess Gone Fishing for a Map of the Universe (2012)

If you were to insist I was a robot, you might not consider me capable of love in some mystic human sense, but you would not be able to distinguish my reactions from that which you would call love — so what difference would it make?

Isaac Asimov The Foundation series (1951)

Anyone who thinks of homosexual love is our enemy. We reject anything which emasculates our people and makes it a plaything for our enemies, for we know that life is fight, and it is madness to think that men will ever embrace fraternally.

Heinrich Himmler

I've lost myself in my work many times. If you love what you do, this can be a Zen thing, where past and future recede to a vanishing point and leave nothing but the perfect vexing, challenging, beguiling now.

John Vorhaus The Albuquerque Turkey (2011)

I’ve watched human beings fool around with love. Love of self mostly, but also love of place, work, ideas; love of friends, of male and female, parent and child. I can’t think of any human illusions more comic than those of love.

Edgar Pangborn A Mirror for Observers (1954)

I have no weapon but love.

Mahatma Gandhi

There shall be no love lost.

Ben Jonson Every Man out of His Humour (1598)

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