“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

"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."

~G.K. Chesterton

"I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend."

~J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

"People in those old times had convictions; we moderns only have opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral."

~Heinrich Heine

"There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves... There is no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves... The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility... According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil." "Pride is the mother hen under which all other sins are hatched." "It is the complete anti-God state of mind."

"Pride always means enmity -- it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God." "For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense."

~C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

"As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you."

"In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that—and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison—you do not know God at all."

"That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God."

~C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years... If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man."

~G. K. Chesterton

"If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed."

~Marcus Aurelius

“Thou art called to endure and to labour, not to a life of ease and trifling talk. Here therefore are men tried as gold in the furnace.”

~Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ