Strengthen me by sympathizing with my strength not my weakness - Amos Bronson Alcott.

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man - Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

The craving for sympathy is the common boundary-line between joy and sorrow - A.W. Hare and J.C. Hare.

The sympathy of sorrow is stronger than the sympathy of prosperity - Benjamin Disraeli.

Love and death are the two great hinges on which all human sympathies turn - Benjamin Robert Haydon.

He that sympathizes in all the happiness of others perhaps himself enjoys the safest happiness, and he that is warned by all the folly of others has perhaps attained the soundest wisdom - Charles Caleb Colton.

Jobling, there are chords in the human mind - Charles Dickens.

Sympathy is especially a Christian duty - Charles Haddon Spurgeon.

To be in one’s own heart in kindly sympathy with all things; this is the nature of righteousness - Confucius.

There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy - Dante.

Sympathy is two hearts tugging at one load - Dr. Charles Henry Parkhurst.

When you are in trouble, people who call to sympathize are really looking for the particulars - Edgar Watson Howe.

Truth is the root, but human sympathy is the flower of practical life - Edwin Hubbell Chapin.

Public feeling now is apt to side with the persecuted, and our modern martyr is full as likely to be smothered with roses as with coals - Edwin Hubbell Chapin.

Next to love, sympathy is the divinest passion of the human heart - Edmund Burke.

Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality - Emily Dickinson.

Women have the genius of charity. A man gives but his gold; a woman adds to it her sympathy - Ernest Wilfrid LeGouve.

At a certain depth all bosoms communicate, all hearts are one - Fredrika Bremer.

Sympathetic people are often uncommunicative about themselves; they give back reflected images which hide their own depths - George Eliot.

The human heart, Finds nowhere shelter but in human kind - George Eliot.

A human life is a story told by God - Hans Christian Andersen.

Far better one unpurchased heart than glory’s proudest name - Henry Theodore Tuckerman.

He spake well who said that graves are the footprints of angels - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

When a man can look upon the simple wild-rose, and feel no pleasure, his taste has been corrupted - Henry Ward Beecher.

True sympathy is putting ourselves in another’s place; and we are moved in proportion to the reality of our imagination - Hosea Ballou.

Nature has concatenated our fortunes and affections together with indissoluble bands of mutual sympathy - Isaac Barrow.

If thou art something bring thy soul and interchange with mine - Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller.

And share the inward fragrance of each other’s heart - John Keats.

For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, “It might have been” - John Greenleaf Whittier.

And with the morn those angel faces smile, which I have loved long since and lost awhile - John Henry Newman.

The secret of language is the secret of sympathy, and its full charm is possible only to the gentle - John Ruskin.

While we are mourning the loss of our friend, others are rejoicing to meet him behind the veil - John Taylor.

A brother’s sufferings claim a brother’s pity - Joseph Addison.

Oh heart, if one should say to you that the soul perishes like the body, answer that the flower withers, but the seed remains - Kahlil Gibran.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight - Kahlil Gibran.

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey - Kenji Miyazawa.

One of the greatest of all mental pleasures is to have our thoughts often divined: ever entered into with sympathy - Letitia Elizabeth Landon.

The world has no sympathy with any but positive griefs. It will pity you for what you lose; never for what you lack - Madame Anne Sophie Swetchine.

Our own cast-off sorrows are not sufficient to constitute sympathy for others - Madame Suzanne Curchod Necker.

The sympathy of most people consists of a mixture of good-humor, curiosity, and self-importance - Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach.

True sympathy is beyond what can be seen and touched and reasoned upon - Mrs. Campbell Praed.

It is certain my belief gains quite infinitely the very moment I can convince another mind thereof - Novalis.

He watched and wept and prayed and felt for all - Oliver Goldsmith.

He watched and wept, he prayed and felt for all - Oliver Goldsmith.

The greatest pleasures of which the human mind is susceptible are the pleasures of consciousness and sympathy - Parke Godwin.

Man is one; and he hath one great heart. It is thus we feel, with a gigantic throb athwart the sea, each other’s rights and wrongs; thus are we men - Philip James Bailey.

There are secret ties, there are sympathies, by the sweet relationship of which souls that are well matched attach themselves to each other, and are affected by I know not what, which cannot be explained - Pierre Corneille.

One man pins me to the wall, while with another I walk among the stars - Ralph Waldo Emerson.

We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man, man - Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The secrets of life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness - Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In the night of death, hope sees a star, and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing - Robert Ingersoll.

Life is eternal, and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight - Rossiter Worthington Raymond.

Sympathy is the golden key that unlocks the hearts of others - Samuel Smiles.

All powerful souls have kindred with each other - Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness - Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Pity and need. Make all flesh kin. There in no caste in blood - Sir Edwin Arnold.

One common calamity makes men extremely affect each other, though they differ in every other particular - Sir Richard Steele.

It is a lively spark of nobleness to descend in most favor to one when he is lowest in affliction - Sir Philip Sidney (Sydney).

Sympathy does not think. It acts. It acts to remove. The ceaseless sufferings. Of the world - Sri Chinmoy.

Sympathy has to be the first and foremost thing in one’s life, sympathy and the feeling of oneness. There cannot be anything greater than the feeling of oneness - Sri Chinmoy.

To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die - Thomas Campbell.

Of a truth, men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one - Thomas Carlyle.

He kept at true good humour’s mark, the social flow of pleasure’s tide:
He never made a brow look dark, Nor caused a tear, but when he died - Thomas Love Peacock.

To rejoice in another’s prosperity is to give content to your lot; to mitigate another’s grief is to alleviate or dispel your own - Tryon Edwards.

Not being untutored in suffering, I learn to pity those in affliction - Vergil.

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds - William Cowper.

Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it - William Hazlitt.

We are governed by sympathy; and the extent of our sympathy is determined by that of our sensibility - William Hazlitt.

Ah! thank heaven, travelers find Samaritans as well as Levites on life’s hard way - William Makepeace Thackeray.

A marriage or a refusal or a proposal thrills through a whole household of women, and sets their hysterical sympathies at work - William Makepeace Thackeray.

For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity - William Penn.

A sympathy in choice - William Shakespeare.

What my tongue dares not that my heart shall say - William Shakespeare.

Only when the sense of the pain of others begins does man begin - Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked - Bernard Meltzer.

The best kind of giving is thanksgiving - Chesterton.

A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all other virtues - Cicero.

Unselfish and noble actions are the most radiant pages in the biography of souls - David Thomas.

When a person doesn’t have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude - Elie Wiesel.

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude - Friedrich Nietzsche.

Silent gratitude isn’t much use to anyone - G.B. Stern.

How beautiful a day can be When kindness touches it! - George Elliston.

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder - G.K. Chesterton.

Silent gratitude isn’t much use to anyone - Gladys B. Stern.

The depth and the willingness with which we serve is a direct reflection of our gratitude - Gordon T. Watts.

No duty is more urgent than that of returning thanks - James Allen.

Gratitude is the memory of the heart - Jean Baptiste Massieu.

The only people with whom you should try to get even are those who have helped you - John E. Southard.

It is the will to be grateful which constitutes gratitude - Joseph Cook.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom - Marcel Proust.

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see - Mark Twain.

If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is “Thank you”, it will be enough - Meister Eckhart.

Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow - Melody Beattie.

Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough - Oprah Winfrey.

The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention - Oscar Wilde.

There is a calmness to a life lived in gratitude, a quiet joy - Ralph H. Blum.

Just a “Thank you” is a mighty powerful prayer. Says it all - Rosie Cash.

Every time we remember to say “Thank you”, we experience nothing less than heaven on earth - Sarah Ban Breathnach.

Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness - Seneca.

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures - Thornton Wilder.

You won’t be happy with more until you’re happy with what you’ve got - Viki King.

Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well - Voltaire.

God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say Thank you - William Arthur Ward.

The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest - William Blake.

Something that has always puzzled me all my life is why, when I am in special need of help, the good deed is usually done by somebody on whom I have no claim - William Feather.

I can no other answer make, but, Thanks, and Thanks - William Shakespeare.

How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world - William Shakespeare.

Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it - William Ward.

Any woman can fool a man if she wants to and if he’s in love with her - Agatha Christie.

Bride. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her - Ambrose Bierce.

A happy marriage is a long conversation that always seems too short - Andre Maurois.

Marriage is a three ring circus: engagement ring, wedding ring, and suffering - Anonymous.

Marriage a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters written in prose - Beverly Nichols.

We sat side by side in the morning light and looked out at the future together - Brian Andres.

The trouble with some woman is that they get all excited about nothing, and then marry him - Cher.

A happy marriage is a new beginning of life, a new starting point for happiness and usefulness - Dean Stanley.

I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid - Dorothy Parker.

In all of the wedding cake, hope is the sweetest of plums - Douglas William Jerrold.

After all there is something about a wedding-gown prettier than in any other gown in the world - Douglas William Jerrold.

Marriage is the mother of the world and preserves kingdoms, and fills cities, and churches, and heaven itself - Dr. Jeremy Taylor.

Two human loves make one divine - Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same - Emily Bronte.

Two souls with but a single thought, Two hearts that beat as one - Friedrich Halm.

Marriage is ever made by destiny - George Chapman.

In Hollywood, brides keep the bouquets and throw away the groom - Groucho Marx.

I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury - Groucho Marx.

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution? - Groucho Marx.

Before marriage a man will lay awake all night thinking about something you said; after marriage he’ll fall asleep before you have finished saying it - Helen Rowland.

Wedding: the point at which a man stops toasting a woman and begins roasting her - Helen Rowland.

Live the life you’ve dreamed - Henry David Thoreau.

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul - Honore de Balzac.

There are three things that last: faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love - I Corinthians.

Marrying a man is like buying something you’ve been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get home, but it doesn’t always go with everything else in the house - Jean Kerr.

Wedding is destiny, and hanging likewise - John Heywood.

Marriages are made in heaven and consummated on Earth - John Lyly.

A woman seldom asks advice before she has bought her wedding clothes - Joseph Addison.

I never married because I have three pets at home that answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog that growls every morning, a parrot that swears all afternoon and a cat that comes home late at night - Marie Corelli.

There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage - Martin Luther.

There is no such cozy combination as man and wife - Menander.

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person - Mignon McLaughlin.

Hail, wedded love, mysterious law; true source of human happiness - Milton.

A wedding anniversary is the celebration of love, trust, partnership, tolerance, and tenacity. The order varies for any given year - Paul Sweeney.

Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight - Phyllis Diller.

Let us celebrate the occasion with wine and sweet words - Plautus.

The woman cries before the wedding and the man after - Polish Proverb.

Marriage is the perfection of what love aimed at, ignorant of what it sought - Ralph Waldo Emerson.

A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude - Rainer Maria Rilke.

I love being married. It’s so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life - Rita Rudner.

It’s a funny thing that when a man hasn’t anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married - Robert Frost.

Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures - Samuel Johnson.

Your words are my food, your breath my wine. You are everything to me - Sarah Bernhardt.

By all means marry. If you get a good wife you will become happy - If you get a bad one you will become a philosopher - Socrates.

Grace and remembrance be to you both - William Shakespeare.

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place - Zora Neale Hurston.

A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he’s finished - Zsa Zsa Gabor.

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves. ~Bill Vaughan

Many people look forward to the new year for a new start on old habits. ~Author Unknown

A New Year’s resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other. ~Author Unknown

Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man. ~Benjamin Franklin

No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam. ~Charles Lamb

New Year’s Day is every man’s birthday. ~Charles Lamb

Never tell your resolution beforehand, or it’s twice as onerous a duty. ~John Selden

Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us. ~Hal Borland

The merry year is born
Like the bright berry from the naked thorn.
~Hartley Coleridge

New Year’s eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights. ~Hamilton Wright Mabie

The Old Year has gone. Let the dead past bury its own dead. The New Year has taken possession of the clock of time. All hail the duties and possibilities of the coming twelve months! ~Edward Payson Powell

Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right. ~Oprah Winfrey

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1850

The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year’s Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you’re married to. ~P.J. O’Rourke

Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past. ~Henry Ward Beecher

New Year’s Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. ~Mark Twain

The new year begins in a snow-storm of white vows. ~George William Curtis

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
~T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day. ~Edith Lovejoy Pierce

Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever. ~Mark Twain

People are so worried about what they eat between Christmas and the New Year, but they really should be worried about what they eat between the New Year and Christmas. ~Author Unknown

And ye, who have met with Adversity’s blast,
And been bow’d to the earth by its fury;
To whom the Twelve Months, that have recently pass’d
Were as harsh as a prejudiced jury -
Still, fill to the Future! and join in our chime,
The regrets of remembrance to cozen,
And having obtained a New Trial of Time,
Shout in hopes of a kindlier dozen.
~Thomas Hood

Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go. ~Brooks Atkinson

Each age has deemed the new-born year
The fittest time for festal cheer.
~Walter Scott

Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account. ~Oscar Wilde

Glory to God in highest heaven,
Who unto man His Son hath given;
While angels sing with tender mirth,
A glad new year to all the earth.
~Martin Luther

A new oath holds pretty well; but… when it is become old, and frayed out, and damaged by a dozen annual retryings of its remains, it ceases to be serviceable; any little strain will snap it. ~Mark Twain, speech in New York City, 31 March 1885

But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year-old habits. ~Andre Gide

I do think New Year’s resolutions can’t technically be expected to begin on New Year’s Day, don’t you? Since, because it’s an extension of New Year’s Eve, smokers are already on a smoking roll and cannot be expected to stop abruptly on the stroke of midnight with so much nicotine in the system. Also dieting on New Year’s Day isn’t a good idea as you can’t eat rationally but really need to be free to consume whatever is necessary, moment by moment, in order to ease your hangover. I think it would be much more sensible if resolutions began generally on January the second. ~Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary

New Year’s Eve, where auld acquaintance be forgot. Unless, of course, those tests come back positive. ~Jay Leno

We meet today
To thank Thee for the era done,
And Thee for the opening one.
~John Greenleaf Whittier

One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: To rise above the little things. ~John Burroughs

Of all sound of all bells… most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year. ~Charles Lamb

A happy New Year! Grant that I
May bring no tear to any eye
When this New Year in time shall end
Let it be said I’ve played the friend,
Have lived and loved and labored here,
And made of it a happy year.
~Edgar Guest

It wouldn’t be New Year’s if I didn’t have regrets. ~William Thomas

We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives… not looking for flaws, but for potential. ~Ellen Goodman

May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions. ~Joey Adams

He who breaks a resolution is a weakling;
He who makes one is a fool.
~F.M. Knowles

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. ~G.K. Chesterton

I think in terms of the day’s resolutions, not the year’s. ~Henry Moore

Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols. ~Thomas Mann

I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me. ~Anaïs Nin

Why won’t they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can’t they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping - rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year’s and Easter and Christmas - But, goodness, why need they do it? ~John Dos Passos, 1917

New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions. ~Mark Twain

Every man regards his own life as the New Year’s Eve of time. ~Jean Paul Richter

The only way to spend New Year’s Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears. ~W.H. Auden

Christmas is a time when you get homesick - even when you’re home. ~Carol Nelson

He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree. ~Roy L. Smith

Christmas, children, is not a date. It is a state of mind. ~Mary Ellen Chase

I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. ~Charles Dickens

Christmas is the gentlest, loveliest festival of the revolving year - and yet, for all that, when it speaks, its voice has strong authority. ~W.J. Cameron

The best of all gifts around any Christmas tree: the presence of a happy family all wrapped up in each other. ~Burton Hillis

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home! ~Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1836

There has been only one Christmas - the rest are anniversaries. ~W.J. Cameron

A Christmas gambol oft could cheer
The poor man’s heart through half the year.
~Walter Scott

Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time. ~Laura Ingalls Wilder

May Peace be your gift at Christmas and your blessing all year through! ~Author Unknown

I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. ~Charles Dickens

Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree. In the eyes of children, they are all 30 feet tall. ~Larry Wilde, The Merry Book of Christmas

Christmas is the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart. ~Washington Irving

Isn’t it funny that at Christmas something in you gets so lonely for - I don’t know what exactly, but it’s something that you don’t mind so much not having at other times. ~Kate L. Bosher

Instead of being a time of unusual behavior, Christmas is perhaps the only time in the year when people can obey their natural impulses and express their true sentiments without feeling self-conscious and, perhaps, foolish. Christmas, in short, is about the only chance a man has to be himself. ~Francis C. Farley

It is Christmas in the heart that puts Christmas in the air. ~W.T. Ellis

For centuries men have kept an appointment with Christmas. Christmas means fellowship, feasting, giving and receiving, a time of good cheer, home. ~W.J. Ronald Tucker

Even as an adult I find it difficult to sleep on Christmas Eve. Yuletide excitement is a potent caffeine, no matter your age. ~Carrie Latet

Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want and their kids pay for it. ~Richard Lamm

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love! ~Hamilton Wright Mabie

Love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen. ~Author unknown, attributed to a 7-year-old named Bobby

Christmas is forever, not for just one day,
for loving, sharing, giving, are not to put away
like bells and lights and tinsel, in some box upon a shelf.
The good you do for others is good you do yourself…
~Norman Wesley Brooks, “Let Every Day Be Christmas,” 1976

From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it. ~Katharine Whitehorn

In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it ‘Christmas’ and went to church; the Jews called it ‘Hanukkah’ and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say ‘Merry Christmas!’ or ‘Happy Hanukkah!’ or (to the atheists) ‘Look out for the wall!’ ~Dave Barry, “Christmas Shopping: A Survivor’s Guide”

Remember
This December,
That love weighs more than gold!
~Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon

I sometimes think we expect too much of Christmas Day. We try to crowd into it the long arrears of kindliness and humanity of the whole year. As for me, I like to take my Christmas a little at a time, all through the year. And thus I drift along into the holidays - let them overtake me unexpectedly - waking up some find morning and suddenly saying to myself: “Why, this is Christmas Day!” ~David Grayson

A Christmas candle is a lovely thing;
It makes no noise at all,
But softly gives itself away.
~Eva Logue

Christmas is not as much about opening our presents as opening our hearts. ~Janice Maeditere

Perhaps the best Yuletide decoration is being wreathed in smiles. ~Author Unknown

Oh look, yet another Christmas TV special! How touching to have the meaning of Christmas brought to us by cola, fast food, and beer…. Who’d have ever guessed that product consumption, popular entertainment, and spirituality would mix so harmoniously? ~Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes

Only in souls the Christ is brought to birth,
And there He lives and dies.
~Alfred Noyes

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs? ~G.K. Chesterton

For the spirit of Christmas fulfils the greatest hunger of mankind. ~Loring A. Schuler

I wish we could put up some of the Christmas spirit in jars and open a jar of it every month. ~Harlan Miller

Once again we find ourselves enmeshed in the Holiday Season, that very special time of year when we join with our loved ones in sharing centuries-old traditions such as trying to find a parking space at the mall. We traditionally do this in my family by driving around the parking lot until we see a shopper emerge from the mall, then we follow her, in very much the same spirit as the Three Wise Men, who 2,000 years ago followed a star, week after week, until it led them to a parking space. ~Dave Barry

Keep your Christmas-heart open all the year round. ~Jessica Archmint

Sing hey! Sing hey!
For Christmas Day;
Twine mistletoe and holly.
For a friendship glows
In winter snows,
And so let’s all be jolly!
~Author Unknown

To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult with every year. ~E.B. White, “The Distant Music of the Hounds,” The Second Tree from the Corner, 1954

At Christmas play and make good cheer,
For Christmas comes but once a year
~Thomas Tusser

Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money. ~Author Unknown

Christmas is for children. But it is for grown-ups too. Even if it is a headache, a chore, and nightmare, it is a period of necessary defrosting of chill and hide-bound hearts. ~Lenora Mattingly Weber

There is a remarkable breakdown of taste and intelligence at Christmastime. Mature, responsible grown men wear neckties made of holly leaves and drink alcoholic beverages with raw egg yolks and cottage cheese in them. ~P.J. O’Rourke

Roses are reddish
Violets are bluish
If it weren’t for Christmas
We’d all be Jewish.
~Benny Hill

Open your presents at Christmastime but be thankful year round for the gifts you receive. ~Lorinda Ruth Lowen

I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become… but there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress. ~May Sarton

Fail not to call to mind, in the course of the twenty-fifth of this month, that the Divinest Heart that ever walked the earth was born on that day; and then smile and enjoy yourselves for the rest of it; for mirth is also of Heaven’s making. ~Leigh Hunt

Great little One! whose all-embracing birth
Lifts Earth to Heaven, stoops Heaven to Earth.
~Richard Crashaw

I do like Christmas on the whole…. In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year. ~E.M. Forster

At Christmas
A man is at his finest towards the finish of the year;
He is almost what he should be when the Christmas season’s here;
Then he’s thinking more of others than he’s thought the months before,
And the laughter of his children is a joy worth toiling for.
He is less a selfish creature than at any other time;
When the Christmas spirit rules him he comes close to the sublime…
~Edgar Guest

Christmas is the season when you buy this year’s gifts with next year’s money. ~Author Unknown

The Church does not superstitiously observe days, merely as days, but as memorials of important facts. Christmas might be kept as well upon one day of the year as another; but there should be a stated day for commemorating the birth of our Saviour, because there is danger that what may be done on any day, will be neglected. ~Samuel Johnson

The Christmas season has come to mean the period when the public plays Santa Claus to the merchants. ~John Andrew Holmes

[I]t is the one season of the year when we can lay aside all gnawing worry, indulge in sentiment without censure, assume the carefree faith of childhood, and just plain “have fun.” Whether they call it Yuletide, Noel, Weinachten, or Christmas, people around the earth thirst for its refreshment as the desert traveller for the oasis. ~D.D. Monroe

May the spirit of Christmas bring you peace,
The gladness of Christmas give you hope,
The warmth of Christmas grant you love.
~Author Unknown

If “ifs” and “buts” were candy and nuts, wouldn’t it be a Merry Christmas? ~Don Meredith

Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice. ~Author Unknown

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The message of Christmas is that the visible material world is bound to the invisible spiritual world. ~Author Unknown

I love the Christmas-tide, and yet,
I notice this, each year I live;
I always like the gifts I get,
But how I love the gifts I give!
~Carolyn Wells

‘Tis blessed to bestow, and yet,
Could we bestow the gifts we get,
And keep the ones we give away,
How happy were our Christmas day!
~Carolyn Wells

Except the Christ be born again tonight
In dreams of all men, saints and sons of shame,
The world will never see his kingdom bright.
~Vachel Lindsay

There’s nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child. ~Erma Bombeck, I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression

The Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot have a nativity scene in Washington, D.C. This wasn’t for any religious reasons. They couldn’t find three wise men and a virgin. ~Jay Leno

I hear that in many places something has happened to Christmas; that it is changing from a time of merriment and carefree gaiety to a holiday which is filled with tedium; that many people dread the day and the obligation to give Christmas presents is a nightmare to weary, bored souls; that the children of enlightened parents no longer believe in Santa Claus; that all in all, the effort to be happy and have pleasure makes many honest hearts grow dark with despair instead of beaming with good will and cheerfulness. ~Julia Peterkin, A Plantation Christmas, 1934

The earth has grown old with its burden of care,
But at Christmas it always is young.
~Phillips Brooks

Let Christmas not become a thing
Merely of merchant’s trafficking,
Of tinsel, bell and holly wreath
And surface pleasure, but beneath
The childish glamour, let us find
Nourishment for soul and mind.
Let us follow kinder ways
Through our teeming human maze,
And help the age of peace to come
From a Dreamer’s martyrdom.
~Madeline Morse

Nothing’s as mean as giving a little child something useful for Christmas. ~Kin Hubbard

Christmas begins about the first of December with an office party and ends when you finally realize what you spent, around April fifteenth of the next year. ~P.J. O’Rourke, Modern Manners

Next to a circus there ain’t nothing that packs up and tears out faster than the Christmas spirit. ~Kin Hubbard

Wouldn’t life be worth the living
Wouldn’t dreams be coming true
If we kept the Christmas spirit
All the whole year through?
~Author Unknown

And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled ’till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more. ~Dr. Seuss

O Christmas Sun! What holy task is thine!
To fold a world in the embrace of God!
~Guy Wetmore Carryl

Christmas - that magic blanket that wraps itself about us, that something so intangible that it is like a fragrance. It may weave a spell of nostalgia. Christmas may be a day of feasting, or of prayer, but always it will be a day of remembrance - a day in which we think of everything we have ever loved. ~Augusta E. Rundel

Santa is very jolly because he knows where all the bad girls live. ~Dennis Miller

People can’t concentrate properly on blowing other people to pieces if their minds are poisoned by thoughts suitable to the twenty-fifth of December. ~Ogden Nash

Oh! lovely voices of the sky
Which hymned the Saviour’s birth,
Are ye not singing still on high,
Ye that sang, “Peace on earth”?
~Felicia Hemans

We hear the beating of wings over Bethlehem and a light that is not of the sun or of the stars shines in the midnight sky. Let the beauty of the story take away all narrowness, all thought of formal creeds. Let it be remembered as a story that has happened again and again, to men of many different races, that has been expressed through many religions, that has been called by many different names. Time and space and language lay no limitations upon human brotherhood. ~New York Times, 25 December 1937, quoted in Quotations for Special Occasions by Maud van Buren, 1938, published by The H.W. Wilson Company, New York