Christian Advent Quotes & Sayings

Give a boy - ANY boy - enough time, and he WILL eventually pick his nose! — Lincoln Peirce

When people think of me initially, they remember me as 'Akeelah.' Sometimes it can be frustrating to be remembered at an age that you've outgrown. — Keke Palmer

The more deeply one enters into the experience of the sacred the more one is aware of one's own personal evil and the destructive forces in society. The fact that one is alive to what is possible for humankind sharpens one's sense that we are fallen people. The awareness of sin is the inevitable consequence of having met grace... This grace-judgment dynamic reveals that the center of Christian life is repentance. This does not mean that the distinguishing mark of the Christian is breast-beating. Feeling sorry, acknowledging guilt, and prolonging regret may be components of the human condition, but they are not what Jesus means by repentance. Repentance is the response to grace that overcomes the past and opens out to a new future. Repentance distinguishes Christian life as one of struggle and conversion and pervades it, not with remorse, but with hope. The message of Jesus is not "Repent," but "Repent for the Kingdom of God is near. — John Shea

In many people Christ lives the life of the Host. Our life is a sacramental life.

This Host life is like the Advent life, like the life of the Child in the womb, the Child in the swaddling bands, the Christ in the tomb. It is a life of dependence upon creatures, of silence and secrecy, of hidden light. It is the life of a prisoner. — Caryll Houselander

Amber," he says in a low, husky voice. "I am madly in love with you. — Karina Halle

Before His visible advent in the flesh the Logos of God dwelt among the patriarchs and prophets in a spiritual manner, prefiguring the mysteries of His advent. After His incarnation He is present in a similar way not only to those who are still beginners, nourishing them spiritually and leading them toward the maturity of divine perfection, but also to the perfect, secretly pre-delineating in them the features of His future advent as if in an ikon. — Maximus The Confessor

The streets were empty and shiny black with fresh rain. I listened to the water rush under the tires and tried to not lose it completely. — Becca Fitzpatrick

The only people who soul can truly magnify the Lord are ... people who acknowledge their lowly estate and are overwhelmed by the condescension of the magnificent God. — John Piper

As if a person's greatness need never be pointed out, for it is there, anyway, in the silent being. — Morrissey

So now we pause. Still. Ponder. Hush. Wait. Each day of Advent, He gives you the gift of time, so you have time to be still and wait. Wait for the coming of the God in the manger who makes Himself bread for us near starved. For the Savior in swaddlings who makes Himself the robe of righteousness for us worn out. For Jesus, who makes precisely what none of us can but all of us want: Christmas. — Ann Voskamp

The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He's supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn't part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation. — William Faulkner

Mathematics catalogues everything that is not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics is an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders. — Greg Egan

Snow is the only one of us that leaves no tracks. — Kenneth Patchen

It's not stupid. I guess havin' hope is better that givin' up and thinking life will such forever. — Simone Elkeles

Just as the teaching of the Law and the prophets, being harbingers of the coming advent of the Logos in the flesh, guide our souls to Christ (cf. Gal. 3:24), so the glorified incarnate Logos of God is Himself a harbinger of His spiritual advent, leading our souls forward by His own teachings to receive His divine and manifest advent. He does this ceaselessly, by means of the virtues converting those found worthy from the flesh to the spirit. And He will do it at the end of the age, making manifest what has hitherto been hidden from men. — Maximus The Confessor

This spirit of humanity breathes in Cicero and Virgil. Hence the veneration paid to the poet of the Aeneid by the fathers and throughout the middle ages. Augustine calls him the noblest of poets, and Dante, "the glory and light of other poets," and "his master," who guided him through the regions of hell and purgatory to the very gates of Paradise. It was believed that in his fourth Eclogue he had prophesied the advent of Christ. This interpretation is erroneous; but "there is in Virgil," says an accomplished scholar,84 "a vein of thought and sentiment more devout, more humane, more akin to the Christian than is to be found in any other ancient poet, whether Greek or Roman. He was a spirit prepared and waiting, though he knew it not, for some better thing to be revealed. — Philip Schaff

For I hold that it is only when we can prove everything we assert that we understand perfectly the thing under consideration. — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Macbeth is a play that points to the advent, much like the turbulent last century of the Middle Ages, of a modern age gradually deracinated from its Christian grounding and increasingly enamored of a neopagan notion of virtu, of potentially infinite human achievement severed from metaphysical considerations. — William Shakespeare

If we keep the path of virtue undefiled through devout and true knowledge, and do not deviate to either side, we will experience the advent of God revealed to us because of our dispassion. For 'I will sing a psalm and in a pure path I will understand when Thou wilt come to me' (cf. Ps. 101:1-2). The psalm stands for virtuous conduct; understanding indicates the spiritual knowledge, gained through virtue, by means of which we perceive God's advent, when we wait for the Lord vigilant in the virtues. — Maximus The Confessor

The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is likely that space as we know it ceases to exist and is replaced by some form of chaotic quantum 'foam', where gravity plays a new role in fashioning the forms of energy that can exist. — Anonymous

Dust jackets are always something of an enigma to me. — Joyce Carol Oates