Profound Christmas Quotes

My attraction had been immediate and profound. And it had nothing to do with the way he looked. My attraction was to what resided between his lines.

Why do you dislike people?" "I didn't say I disliked people. Not to like people isn't the same as to dislike them." He sounded profound and I needed time to mull over that idea.

unknown abyss, whose depths were secrets as profound as Death:

Indeed, there is a deep melding of our humanity around a shared experience, and in that melding we find profound comfort knowing that we are not alone in the experience of it.

I sometimes doubt whether even the friends whose kind thoughts turned downwards me that evening from the distant South and West could realize how cheerful is the recollection of the Christmas spent in the solitude and cold of the desert.

I had spent enough time in France to know that the words 'chez moi' meant something a thousand times more profound than one's current home. 'Chez moi' was the place your parents came from, or maybe even the region of your parents' parents. The food you ate at Christmas, your favorite kind of cheese, your best childhood memories of summer vacation -- all of these derived from 'chez moi.' And even if you had never lived there, 'chez moi' was knitted into your identity; it colored the way you viewed the world and the way the world viewed you.

Christmas is a timeless tale of hope, love, and the profound art of selfless giving.

COMPASSION ALERT: As we enter the Season of Goodwill - Feel the warm glow in your heart by lighting up a smile on someone's face

Easter is so profound. Christmas was an afterthought in the early Church, the birth not observed for a couple hundred years. But no one could help noticing the resurrection: Rumi said that spring was Christ, “martyred plants rising up from their shrouds.” Easter says that love is more powerful than death, bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, bigger even than airport security lines.

To those who recognize in Jesus the wonder of the Son of God, every one of his words and deeds becomes a wonder; they find in him the last, most profound, most helpful counsel for all needs and questions. Yes, before the child can open his lips, he is full of wonder and full of counsel. Go to the child in the manger. Believe him to be the Son of God, and you will find in him wonder upon wonder, counsel upon counsel.

At noon a huge crowd of retarded people came to visit Santa and passed me on my little island. These people were profoundly retarded. They were rolling their eyes and wagging their tongues and staggering toward Santa. It was a large group of retarded people and after watching them for a few minutes I could not begin to guess where the retarded people ended and the regular New Yorkers began. Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.

From a theological point of view, Easter is the center of the Church year; but Christmas is the most profoundly human feast of faith, because it allows us to feel most deeply the humanity of God. The crib has a unique power to show us what it means to say that God wished to be “Immanuel”—a “God with us”, a God whom we may address in intimate language, because he encounters us as a child. This makes Christmas a feast that invites us in a special way to meditation, to an internal act of looking at the Word.

The reason I suggest making some of this small meal yourself is because ritual hs an anticipatory relevance - we prepare for it, practically and psychologically; that’s part of its benefit. It’s about making your own raft of time. Your own doorway into Christmas. You can do this with family and friends, of course, if they’re in the zone. And yes, you could do it while wrapping presents, but it wouldn’t be as powerful. Ritual isn’t about multitasking. Ritual is time cut out of time. Done right it has profound psychological effects.

How was it that the profound simplicity of those words had the power to rock her world? Never again would she lose sight of what mattered, not for a day or an hour or even a minute. She would treasure every instant of her life from now on, for she knew something now, a deep truth that had eluded her all of her life. Love wasn’t a great, burning brushfire that swept across your soul and charred you beyond recognition. It was being there, simply that. It was a few people, standing together in a living room, trimming a Christmas tree with the decorations that represented the sum total of who they were, where they’d been, what they believed in. It was simple, everyday moments that laid like bricks, one atop another, until they formed a foundation so solid that nothing could make them fall. Not wind, not rain … not even the faded, watercolor memories of a once-brushfire passion.

It was a great surprise to Scrooge, while listening to the moaning of the wind, and thinking what a solemn thing it was to move on through the lonely darkness over an unknown abyss, whose depths were secrets as profound as death – it was a great surprise to Scrooge, while thus engaged, to hear a hearty laugh.

But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. Luke 2:19 Mary focused on caring for her baby while she stored all she’d seen and done “like a secret treasure in her heart” (NIrV). Some women like to talk their way through experiences; others prefer the Mary approach: “weighing and pondering” (AMP), “mulling them over” (CJB), and “trying to understand them” (ERV). Sometimes the Lord does such a profound work in us and through us that sharing it with others would sound like bragging. Even if we say, “Look what God has done,” others may perceive it as “Look what I’ve done” or “Look how special I am!” God, as always, knows best. The shepherds were noisy, yet the mother of Jesus was quiet.

The first inkling of this notion had come to him the Christmas before, at his daughter's place in Vermont. On Christmas Eve, as indifferent evening took hold in the blue squares of the windows, he sat alone in the crepuscular kitchen, imbued with a profound sense of the identity of winter and twilight, of twilight and time, of time and memory, of his childhood and that church which on this night waited to celebrate the second greatest of its feasts. For a moment or an hour as he sat, become one with the blue of the snow and the silence, a congruity of star, cradle, winter, sacrament, self, it was as though he listened to a voice that had long been trying to catch his attention, to tell him, Yes, this was the subject long withheld from him, which he now knew, and must eventually act on. He had managed, though, to avoid it. He only brought it out now to please his editor, at the same time aware that it wasn't what she had in mind at all. But he couldn't do better; he had really only the one subject, if subject was the word for it, this idea of a notion or a holy thing growing clear in the stream of time, being made manifest in unexpected ways to an assortment of people: the revelation itself wasn't important, it could be anything, almost. Beyond that he had only one interest, the seasons, which he could describe endlessly and with all the passion of a country-bred boy grown old in the city. He was beginning to doubt (he said) whether these were sufficient to make any more novels out of, though he knew that writers of genius had made great ones out of less. He supposed really (he didn't say) that he wasn't a novelist at all, but a failed poet, like a failed priest, one who had perceived that in fact he had no vocation, had renounced his vows, and yet had found nothing at all else in the world worth doing when measured by the calling he didn't have, and went on through life fatally attracted to whatever of the sacerdotal he could find or invent in whatever occupation he fell into, plumbing or psychiatry or tending bar. ("Novelty")

But he hadn’t appeared that night. Not the next morning, either. By the time she finally crossed paths with him the following afternoon, his mumbled “Merry Christmas” was the extent of their exchange. It seemed they were back to silence. I don’t want you. She tried to ignore the words echoing in her memory. They weren’t true, she told herself. She was an expert at deceit; she knew a lie when she heard one. Still. What else to believe, when he avoided her thus? Although he rarely spoke to her over the next two days, Sophia frequently overheard him speaking of her. Even these remarks were the tersest of commands: “Fetch Miss Turner more water,” or “See that her canopy doesn’t go slack.” She felt herself being tended, not unlike a goat. Fed, watered, sheltered. Perhaps she shouldn’t complain. Food, water, and shelter were all welcome things. But Sophia was not livestock, and she had other, more profound needs. Needs he seemed intent on neglecting, the infuriating man.

Mr. Micawber pressed my hand, and groaned, and afterwards shed tears. I was greatly touched, and disappointed too, for I had expected that we should be quite gay on this happy and long-looked-for occasion. But Mr. and Mrs. Micawber were so used to their old difficulties, I think, that they felt quite shipwrecked when they came to consider that they were released from them. All their elasticity was departed, and I never saw them half so wretched as on this night; insomuch that when the bell rang, and Mr. Micawber walked with me to the lodge, and parted from me there with a blessing, I felt quite afraid to leave him by himself, he was so profoundly miserable.

He was taller than Kay, which gave him just the geometric extent to wholly wrap her back. He could honestly say that he could not remember ever lying around her, beside her, or intertwined with her in a position that was slightly uncomfortable—that was, in fact, anything short of sumptuous. The earthy tones of his wife’s natural scent hit a descant note of sweetness, and featured the same subtle complexity that Kay savoured in red wine; thus he loved nothing better than nestling a cheek on her shoulder to inhale at the base of her neck, where the heady smell was distilled. She didn’t snore, but she did have an endearing habit of talking as she dreamt, which helped convey that the shifting and realigning of their bodies during the night were a form of conversation. Their sleep was best in winter and constituted the most winning aspect of the season (in comparison, sod Christmas), when they lowered the thermostat to 12°C and doubled the duvets, the air sharp and fresh in their lungs, their bodies in due course so indolently warm that it felt almost criminal. An instep cooled outside the duvet would slip bracingly against his calf; a hand warmed under the pillow would cup the side of his neck, making him feel not only safe and beloved, but more profoundly and perfectly present in the single beating moments of his life than he ever felt during the day.

I have some questions for you.” Serious, indeed. He brushed her hair back from her forehead with his thumb. “I will answer to the best of my ability.” “You know about changing nappies.” “I do.” “You know about feeding babies.” “Generally, yes.” “You know about bathing them.” “It isn’t complicated.” She fell silent, and Vim’s curiosity grew when Sophie rolled to her back to regard him almost solemnly. “I asked Papa to procure us a special license.” He’d wondered why the banns hadn’t been cried but hadn’t questioned Sophie’s decision. “I assumed that was to allow your brothers to attend the ceremony.” “Them? Yes, I suppose.” She was in a quiet, Sophie-style taking over something, so he slid his arm around her shoulders and kissed her temple. “Tell me, my love. If I can explain my youthful blunders to you over a glass of eggnog, then you can confide to me whatever is bothering you.” She ducked her face against his shoulder. “Do you know the signs a woman is carrying?” He tried to view it as a mere question, a factual inquiry. “Her menses likely cease, for one thing.” Sophie took Vim’s hand and settled it over the wonderful fullness of her breast then shifted, arching into his touch. “What else?” He thought back to his stepmother’s confinements, to what he’d learned on his travels. “From the outset, she might be tired at odd times,” he said slowly. “Her breasts might be tender, and she might have a need to visit the necessary more often than usual.” She tucked her face against his chest and hooked her leg over his hips. “You are a very observant man, Mr. Charpentier.” With a jolt of something like alarm—but not simply alarm—Vim thought back to Sophie’s dozing in church, her marvelously sensitive breasts, her abrupt departure from the room when they’d first gathered for dinner. “And,” he said slowly, “some women are a bit queasy in the early weeks.” She moved his hand, bringing it to her mouth to kiss his knuckles, then settling it low on her abdomen, over her womb. “A New Year’s wedding will serve quite nicely if we schedule it for the middle of the day. I’m told the queasiness passes in a few weeks, beloved.” To Vim’s ears, there was a peculiar, awed quality to that single, soft endearment. The feeling that came over him then was indescribable. Profound peace, profound awe, and profound gratitude coalesced into something so transcendent as to make “love”—even mad, passionate love—an inadequate description. “If you are happy about this, Sophie, one tenth as happy about it as I am, then this will have been the best Christmas season anybody ever had, anywhere, at any time. I vow this to you as the father of your children, your affianced husband, and the man who loves you with his whole heart.” She

The baby who will be born in Bethlehem is the only begotten Son of God, consubstantial with the Father, eternal, having his own divine nature and also the human nature which he has assumed in Mary’s virginal womb. When we look at him this Christmas and see him helpless in the arms of his mother, we must not forget that this is God, made man for love of us, every single one of us. During these days when we read with profound wonder the words of the Gospel and dwelt among us, or when we say the Angelus, we shall have a good opportunity for making a deep and grateful act of faith, and for adoring the sacred Humanity of Our Lord.

I travel to be replenished with beauty, for travel makes the beauty of this world seem like a Christmas that never ends. I travel for the jolting, angelic act of seeking strangeness and newness and profoundness . . .

The profound gift of Christmas is our salvation and forgiveness. The babe born in Bethlehem would give his life to save us from our sin.

Christmas is a timeless story of hope, love, and the profound art of selfless giving.

That precious Christmas memory and now-famous morsel of family lore, however, led me to a number of profound conclusions: There was no Santa. The reason behind my aunt’s itchy stocking was not that it was made of polyester. Joe Reynolds was bound to have a good year after a string of bad ones. Nixon indeed needed all the help he could get. And no family holiday—no holiday, period—is ever as perfect as we dream it will be. I should know. My family always had the best of intentions with our holiday celebrations

The hands of man can manufacture many things both penetratingly brilliant and utterly astounding. Yet, despite their amazing dexterity and profound skill they cannot manufacture hope. Such a masterpiece as that is left for the hands of God and a manger crafted by those hands.