"Men will learn eventually, and if they insist on rejecting the received wisdom of generations past, they do not thereby succeed at invalidating it; they merely condemn themselves to learning it, time and again, by ever grimmer experience."

"A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty."

~Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death."

~Joseph de Maistre

“…for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amid the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and—kindly acquaintance with all neighbors, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood." — George Eliot

"A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us."

+St. Antony the Great

"Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad."

"He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage."

~George Orwell, 1984

Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary men, that you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

Isaiah 7:13-14

“Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel”(which means “God with us”).

Matthew 1:20-23

"The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why."

"There is something defiant in it also; something that makes the abrupt bells at midnight sound like the great guns of a battle that has just been won. All this indescribable thing that we call the Christmas atmosphere only hangs in the air as something like a lingering fragrance or fading vapour from the exultant explosion of that one hour in the Judean hills nearly two thousand years ago. But the savour is still unmistakable, and it is something too subtle or too solitary to be covered by our use of the word peace."

~G.K. Chesterton

“Once in our world, a Stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world.”

~C.S. Lewis

"He lay in the manger, and he attracted the Magi from the East; he was hidden in a stable, and thus this day would be called Epiphany, which means manifestation; with that he recommends his greatness and humility, so that he who was clearly indicated by the opened heavens would be sought and found in the narrownes of the stable, and the powerless in the infant members, wrapped in infant clothes, would be adored by the Magi and feared by evil men."

+Saint Augustine

"Though no man knew it, the hour was near which was to end and to fulfil all things; and though no man heard it, there was one far-off cry in an unknown tongue upon the heaving wilderness of the mountains. The shepherds had found their Shepherd."

"It might be suggested... that nothing had happened in that fold or crack in the great grey hills except that the whole universe had been turned inside out. I mean that all the eyes of wonder and worship which had been turned outwards to the largest thing were now turned inward to the smallest."

~G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

"The birth of Christ is the central event in the history of the Earth - the very thing the whole story has been about."

~C.S. Lewis

"See the Creator of man made man in order that he who governs the world of the stars might suck milk, that bread might be hungry, that the fount might be thirsty, that light might go to sleep, that the way might be tired by the trip, that Truth might be accused by false witnesses, and that the judge of the living and the dead might be examined by a temporal judge and that justice might be condemned by the unjust. That discipline might be lashed by a whip, that the bunch of grapes might be crowned with thorns, that the foundation stone might be hung on a tree, that virtue might become weak, health wounded, and life itself might die."

+Saint Augustine

"A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end, has repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle."

"And the barbarian who conceived the crudest fancy about the sun being stolen and hidden in a box, or the wildest myth about the god being rescued and his enemy deceived with a stone, was nearer to the secret of the cave and knew more about the crisis of the world, than all those in the circle of cities round the Mediterranean who had become content with cold abstractions or cosmopolitan generalizations...

The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic; it was not a place of myths allegorized or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true.

Since that hour no mythologies have been made in the world. Mythology is a search."

~G.K. Chesterton

"[The Incarnation of Christ] met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story. That is why the ideal figure had to be a historical character as nobody had ever felt Adonis or Pan to be a historical character. But that is also why the historical character had to be the ideal figure; and even fulfill many of the functions given to these other ideal figures; why he was at once the sacrifice and the feast, why he could be shown under the emblems of the growing vine or the rising sun."

~G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

"Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call 'real things'."

~C.S. Lewis

"Doctrines are not the main thing about Christianity. Doctrines are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in "a language more adequate." The more adequate language was the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ. The primary language of Christianity is not doctrinal — not propositional or systematic — but historical: a lived language, the factual story of someone being born, dying, and living again in a new, ineffably transformed way."

~Michael Ward

"The promise in the face of every new-born baby outweighs the future horrors that the world now faces because the promise in the face of the baby Jesus outweighs the horror of evil itself."

~John Milbank

“He by whom all things were made was made one of all things. The Son of God by the Father without a mother became the Son of man by a mother without a father. The Word Who is God before all time became flesh at the appointed time. The maker of the sun was made under the sun. He Who fills the world lays in a manger, great in the form of God but tiny in the form of a servant; this was in such a way that neither was His greatness diminished by His tininess, nor was His tininess overcome by His greatness.”

+Saint Augustine

"Let men jump for joy, let women jump for joy; Christ was born a man and born of woman and both sexes are honored in him. Leap about, holy children, who chose Christ, to imitate him in the way of purity; jump for joy, holy virgins; the Virgin has given birth for you to be betrothed to him without corruption. Rejoice, you just, because it is the birthday of him who makes just. Celebrate a feast you weak and sick, because it is the birthday of the Savior. Be happy, oh captives; your redeemer is born. Delight, oh you servants, because the Lord is born. Be glad, oh freemen, because it is the birthday of the Liberator. Let Christians be glad, because Christ is born!"

+Saint Augustine

“Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”

~C.S. Lewis

"There were only two classes of people who heard the cry on Christmas night: shepherds, and wise men. Shepherds: those who know they know nothing. Wise men: those who know they do not know everything. Only the very simple and very learned discovered God -- never the man with one book.”

+Venerable Fulton Sheen

"Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again."

~André Gide