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21 " Every day is worthy of celebration because every day is a present you receive by grace. "
― Mensah Oteh
22 " Nate stared, slack-jawed as the cab merged with the traffic and became impossible to spot. That was it.They chose each other.Just then, the dark sky lit up with fireworks. A cab sailing the street honked in celebration . In the night air , Nate thought he could hear Serena and Blairs' laughter, though he knew that was impossible; they were too far away by now.But as we know, in this city anything is possible "
― Cecily von Ziegesar , I Will Always Love You (Gossip Girl, #12)
23 " You can keep your paper promisesand all your worldly treasures.But you cannot buy peace of mindor escape from the headstone garden.Lyrics from " Headstone Garden" by the Troubled Land Band at the Independence Day celebration 12 years after the impact that destroyed civilization. "
24 " In alien lands I keep the bodyOf ancient native rites and things:I gladly free a little birdieAt celebration of the spring.I'm now free for consolation,And thankful to almighty Lord:At least, to one of his creationsI've given freedom in this world! "
― Alexander Pushkin , Poemas
25 " For the anarch, little has changed; flags have meaning for him, but not sense. I have seen them in the air and on the ground like leaves in May and November; and I have done so as a contemporary and not just as a historian. The May Day celebration will survive, but with a different meaning. New portraits will head up the processions. A date devoted to the Great Mother is re-profaned. A pair of lovers in the wood pays more homage to it. I mean the forest as something undivided, where every tree is still a liberty tree.For the anarch, little is changed when he strips off a uniform that he wore partly as fool’s motley, partly as camouflage. It covers his spiritual freedom, which he will objectivate during such transitions. This distinguishes him from the anarchist, who, objectively unfree, starts raging until he is thrust into a more rigorous straitjacket. "
― Ernst Jünger , Eumeswil
26 " What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. "
― Frederick Douglass
27 " But I don't like it, okay? I don't like how everything is changing. It's like when you're a kid, you think that things like the holidays are meant to show you how things always stay the same, how you have the same celebration year after year, and that's why it's so special. But the older you get, the more you realize that, yes, there are all these things that link you to the past, and you're using the same words and singing the same songs that have always been there for you, but each time, things have shifted, and you have to deal with that shift. Because maybe you don't notice it every single day. Maybe it's only on days like today that you notice it a lot. And I know I'm supposed to be able to deal with that, but I'm not sure I can deal with that.--David Levithan (p. 201 in galley) "
― , The Twelve Days of Dash & Lily (Dash & Lily, #2)
28 " Peter Brown, that great historian of early Christianity, has given the most cogent explanation for the arising of the cult of the saints in the late Roman world. He explains that the emphasis of early Christian preaching on judgment, on the human need for redemption from sin, brought to the minds of common people — among whom Christianity was early successful — their social and political condition. Having strictly limited powers to remedy any injustice they might suffer, or to clear themselves of any charges of wrongdoing, they turned, when they could, to their social betters in hope of aid. If a local patrician could befriend them — could be, at least for a time, their patron — then they had a chance, at least, of receiving justice or at least escaping punishment. “It is this hope of amnesty,” Brown writes, “that pushed the saint to the foreground as patronus. For patronage and friendship derived their appeal from a proven ability to render malleable seemingly inexorable processes, and to bridge with the warm breath of personal acquaintance the great distances of the late-Roman social world. In a world so sternly organized around sin and justice, patrocimium [patronage] and amicitia [friendship] provided a much-needed language of amnesty.”As this cult became more and more deeply entrenched in the Christian life, it made sense for there to be, not just feast days for individual saints, but a day on which everyone’s indebtedness to the whole company of saints — gathered around the throne of God, pleading on our behalf — could be properly acknowledged. After all, we do not know who all the saints are: no doubt men and women of great holiness escaped the notice of their peers, but are known to God. They deserve our thanks, even if we cannot thank them by name. So the logic went: and a general celebration of the saints seems to have begun as early as the fourth century, though it would only be four hundred years later that Pope Gregory III would designate the first day of November as the Feast of All Saints. "
― Alan Jacobs , Original Sin: A Cultural History
29 " Christmas is a sacred festival. It is celebration of Christ love for Humankind. And the love that bind us together. "
― Lailah Gifty Akita ,
30 " Christmas is a celebration of Christ love for Humankind. And the love that bind us together as sacred family. "
31 " Such terms as 'diagnosis' and 'pathology' are of course used analogically here, but I am using the word 'science' deliberate and unequivocally in its original and broad sense of discovery and knowing, rather than its conventional sense of isolating the secondary causes of natural phenomena. For if I believe anything, it is that the primary business of literature and art is cognitive, a kind of finding out and knowing and telling, both in good times and bad; a celebration of the way things are when they are right, and a diagnostic enterprise when they are wrong. "
― Walker Percy
32 " When boys called Bob and Bono would bring their own wild-rhythm celebration and the world would fall down in worshipful hallelujahs as it again acknowledged Ireland's capacity to create missionaries. So what if they were " the boys in the band" ? They sang from a pulpit, an enormous pulpit looking down on a congregation that would knock your eyes out. A city that had produced Joyce and Beckett and Yeats, a country that had produced poet-heroes and more priests and nuns per head of population than almost any on earth was not going to spawn boys who just wanted to stand before a packed hall of gyrating teenagers and strum their guitars and sing. They had to have a message. One of salvation; they were in it to save the world. Like I said, we're teachers, missionaries. "
33 " The victory is not only the pathway of celebration but also to take the greater degree of responsibility for those who were victimised. "
― Nilantha Ilangamuwa
34 " Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide—one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave—of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers. "
― Christopher Hitchens , The Enemy
35 " The morning was, therefore, a mixture of a plenitude of densities, from the presence of the placid birds, to the mundane premonition, to the spring of small glisters which accompanied that autumnal rain. The music, in a simple whistle, recreated a new universe with the parish and all the hearts that were witness to it- padre, pigeons, swallows, the world!- were clothed in a new carnivalesque colouring: a celebration from within. "
― Ondjaki , The Whistler
36 " What was that? Valentine's Day? Her heart gave a little skip at the thought, she had never spent it in a romantic way before, usually the day meant sending and receiving cute Cupid cards and heart shaped sugar candies, but it was all in a platonic celebration of friendship. This time, it would not be like that, it would be ... special. "
― E.A. Bucchianeri , Brushstrokes of a Gadfly, (Gadfly Saga, #1)
37 " I cannot wish you ...I cannot wish you good fortuneknowing that good fortune is what you are, while bad fortune is just a mistaken identityI cannot wish you all the things of earthsince earth itself is yours and that is sufficient, while all the rest will never be enoughI cannot wish you the things you want to see when much unseen is also here waiting for your denial of mind that refuses to see I cannot wish you strength or courage to conquer the troubles and tribulations of lifebecause you alone are the master of limits and imaginary linesI cannot wish you an easy and safe path in all your venturessafe and easy paths are unworthy of the worthyI cannot wish you any kind of freedom you may seeklife is the proof of freedom ; seeking is your prison ; expectations are your guardsI cannot wish you any kind of happinessheart is too blind to be content in the certainty of reality, excellence and immortality of things I cannot wish you good health the voice within asking ever provoking questions is your health ; fear that silences you is your illnessI cannot wish you anythingas long as life is about being instead of havingMaybe holiday season is just not about wishes and celebration at allmaybe, just maybe, it is just a reminder about the power of state of mindWhat else than state of mind can make things look beautiful when in fact they are uglywhat else than state of mind can make things look ugly when in fact they are beautifulLet the New Year be the year in which we choose to be the masters of the mind and not its slave. "
38 " On Christmas morning when the beach is calling and the family’s gathering and the presents are a mystery (or definitely feels book-shaped anyway), and after the splendour and celebration of Christmas Eve, we don’t want Christmas Day to be an anticlimax. We’ve gifted our Oxfam goats or geese and bought our CWS calendars, and what we’d like, on Christmas Day, what we really want, is for things to be—perfect. Just like the old days. Something new, but also something familiar.And that’s what’s so wonderful about the Christmas story, and why preachers penning their reflections approach with trepidation but also with joy: at Christmas, the news is all good. "
― Bronwyn Angela White , Something new to say (words of spirit and faith #2)
39 " Christmas is holy celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. And God’s great love is the divinity of birth: the spirit of love, joy and hope. "
40 " Is there plenty of celebration in your life? How about your spiritual life? Is it an exercise in following rules and practices? Or does it look more like a joyous celebration? "
― Steve Goodier
