At Christmas, I am always struck by how the spirit of togetherness lies also at the heart of the Christmas story. A young mother and a dutiful father with their baby were joined by poor shepherds and visitors from afar. They came with their gifts to worship the Christ child.

Christmas time! That man must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused – in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened – by the recurrence of Christmas.

Pfft, I hate Christmas Day. It’s for children and families. Not for people like me.

Start your week off right by getting back to what is really important – honoring God.

Worship is transcendent wonder.

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

I’ve been saying for a couple of years now that people need to let God out of the Sunday morning box, that He doesn’t want to just be with you for an hour or two on Sunday morning and then put back in His box to sit there until you have an emergency, but He wants to invade your Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Being part of a community with a church at its centre and singin‘ hymns is a great thing to do.

I want a baby from an Italian – possibly Sicilian – donor.

I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks.

Christmas is joy, religious joy, an inner joy of light and peace.

Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges – on gifts, trades, loans – and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.

Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.

I feel really blessed when people start comparing me with Sachin, but I keep myself focused on my performance and not on such comparisons. I literally worship him, so I don’t see too much in this comparison. No cricketer has been able to score one hundred centuries like Sachin.

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

It’s silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.

I believe that God has put gifts and talents and ability on the inside of every one of us. When you develop that and you believe in yourself and you believe that you’re a person of influence and a person of purpose, I believe you can rise up out of any situation.

My friend has a baby. I’m recording all the noises he makes so later I can ask him what he meant.

Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.

What I cry out for, like every being, with my whole life and all my earthly passion, is something very different from an equal to cherish: it is a God to adore.

A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, ‚darkness‘ on the walls of his cell.

I like gifts. I like to give them and I like to get them.

Christmas means a great deal to me. I was reared in a family that celebrated Christmas to some extent, but I married into a family that celebrated Christmas in a big way. And my wife always made a big thing of Christmas for the children. We have five children, and we had a terrific time at Christmas.

In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.

No matter what, I always make it home for Christmas. I love to go to my Tennessee Mountain Home and invite all of my nieces and nephews and their spouses and kids and do what we all like to do – eat, laugh, trade presents and just enjoy each other… and sometimes I even dress up like Santa Claus!

Man’s only true happiness is to live in hope of something to be won by him. Reverence something to be worshipped by him, and love something to be cherished by him, forever.

God made and governs the world invisibly, and has commanded us to love and worship him and no other God; to honor our parents and masters, and love our neighbours as ourselves; and to be temperate, just, and peaceable, and to be merciful even to brute beasts.

I was one of the wildest Santa Clauses they ever had.

Wonder is the basis of worship.

I learned to walk as a baby, and I haven’t had a lesson since.

When I admire the wonders of a sunset or the beauty of the moon, my soul expands in the worship of the creator.

When I was younger we had a grape arbor, and my mom would go out and pick grapes and make grape jam in the sink – boil it, put it in jars, and give it away as gifts.

Think of our physical sustenance. It is truly heaven-sent. The necessities of air, food, and water all come to us as gifts from a loving Heavenly Father.

India has 2,000,000 gods and worships them all. In religion, all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.

But with Christ, we have access in a one-to-one relationship, for, as in the Old Testament, it was more one of worship and awe, a vertical relationship. The New Testament, on the other hand, we look across at a Jesus who looks familiar, horizontal. The combination is what makes the Cross.

Maybe Christmas, the Grinch thought, doesn’t come from a store.

For many, Christmas is also a time for coming together. But for others, service will come first.

I like the idea of putting your Christmas wish list up and letting people share it.

God never gives someone a gift they are not capable of receiving. If he gives us the gift of Christmas, it is because we all have the ability to understand and receive it.

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.

The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship.

Stay active. Read the Word. Worship with other believers. Continue to give. Keep learning and growing. Your faith will be unleashed!

My next baby will be my new record.

Books! I dunno if I ever told you this, but books are the greatest gift one person can give another.

The highest form of worship is the worship of unselfish Christian service. The greatest form of praise is the sound of consecrated feet seeking out the lost and helpless.

Christmas is a season not only of rejoicing but of reflection.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

To gather with God’s people in united adoration of the Father is as necessary to the Christian life as prayer.

Too many of us now tend to worship self indulgence and consumption.

Christmas is a tonic for our souls. It moves us to think of others rather than of ourselves. It directs our thoughts to giving.

The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.

That’s the true spirit of Christmas; people being helped by people other than me.

I think we’ve taken the meaning of Christmas out. People don’t stop and think about Jesus or the birth of Jesus. When they think of Christmas, they think of Santa Claus and – for the children, and they think of giving gifts and out-giving the next person of spending their time looking for the right thing for somebody who has everything.

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

I just think that it’s strong and it’s important that we recognize what the Christmas season is about; it’s about the birth of our Savior, and there’s a lot of pressure today to be politically correct, but people are realizing, too, that you have to be open to express your faith what you want believe.

I want to challenge you today to get out of your comfort zone. You have so much incredible potential on the inside. God has put gifts and talents in you that you probably don’t know anything about.

I do not think I should care to go on worshipping a Madonna even if she did wink. One cannot make much out of a wink. We want something more than that from the object of our adoration.

I do not doubt that we would become more useful if we praised God more, and others would join us, for they would see that God has blessed us.

Let not a libation of tears be the only offering at the shrine of Jesus; let us also rejoice with joy unspeakable. If we have need to lament our sin, how much more to rejoice at our pardon!

We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States.