Christmas and New Year Quotes

Words of Wit and Wisdom

Mature couple greeting guests at Christmas party, smiling
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What do the wise and witty say about Christmas and the New Year? You can use these quotes for inspiration and see who is a kindred spirit. You might want to include one in your holiday greeting cards, social media posts, or family Christmas letter. Reach out to friends or relatives on the other side of the planet and shower them with these caring words.

Phillips Brooks

"Christmas day is a day of joy and charity. May God make you very rich in both."

W. J. Cameron

"There has been only one Christmas—the rest are anniversaries."

Sydney Smith

"Resolve to make at least one person happy every day, and then in ten years you may have made three thousand, six hundred and fifty persons happy, or brightened a small town by your contribution to the fund of general enjoyment."

Erma Bombeck

"There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child."

Pat Boone

"The Christmas spirit -- love -- changes hearts and lives."

Isabel Currier

"It is the personal thoughtfulness, the warm human awareness, the reaching out of the self to one's fellow man that makes giving worthy of the Christmas spirit."

Patricia Clafford

"Christmas is a time to expand our giving encompassing the friendless and needy... near and far. Christmas is sharing."

Debbie Harry

"I always work on New Year's Eve, no matter what."

Charles Lamb

"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."

Edward Payson Powell

"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!"

Mark Twain

"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."

Buddha

"There is only one time when it is essential to awaken. That time is now."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

"The ills from which we are suffering have their seat in the very foundation of human thought. But today something is happening to the whole structure of human consciousness. A fresh kind of life is starting."

Charles Dickens

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."

T. S. Eliot

"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."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."

William Thomas

"It wouldn't be New Year's if I didn't have regrets."