Celebration Quotes

“People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state--it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle.... Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one's actions.
Source: The Wisdom of Heschel”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel

“A birth-date is a reminder to celebrate the life as well as to update the life.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you.
Have you given much thought to our mortal condition?
Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen.
All mortals owe a debt to death.
There's no one alive
who can say if he will be tomorrow.
Our fate moves invisibly! A mystery.
No one can teach it, no one can grasp it.
Accept this! Cheer up! Have a drink!
But don't forget Aphrodite--that's one sweet goddess.
You can let the rest go. Am I making sense?
I think so. How about a drink.
Put on a garland. I'm sure
the happy splash of wine will cure your mood.
We're all mortal you know. Think mortal.
Because my theory is, there's no such thing as life,
it's just catastrophe.”
― Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“Celebrate who you are in your deepest heart. Love yourself and the world will love you.”
― Amy Leigh Mercree

“It's a fine line between Saturday night and Sunday morning.”
― Jimmy Buffett

“Anyone who's just driven 90 yards against huge men trying to kill them has earned the right to do Jazz hands. ”
― Craig Ferguson

“I've told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation.”
― Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

“This is a wonderful day,” Anthony was muttering to himself. “A wonderful day.” He looked up sharply at Gareth. “You don’t have sisters, do you?”
“None,” Gareth confirmed.
“I am in possession of four,” Anthony said, tossing back at least a third of the contents of his glass. “Four. And now they’re all off my hands. I’m done,” he said, looking as if he might break into a jig at any moment. “I’m free.”
“You’ve daughters, don’t you?” Gareth could not resist reminding him.
“Just one, and she’s only three. I have years before I have to go through this again. If I’m lucky, she’ll convert to Catholicism and become a nun.
Gareth choked on his drink.
“It’s good, isn’t it?” Anthony said, looking at the bottle. “Aged twenty-four years.”
“I don’t believe I’ve ever ingested anything quite so ancient,” Gareth murmured.”
― Julia Quinn, It's in His Kiss

“Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we'll die”
― Dave Matthews

“You know how it goes:
at some point in your life,
you fell in love with someone
and had a glimpse of God.
Then you abandoned life and lover
and started celebrating
your love for God.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Pies mean Thanksgiving and Christmas and picnics.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“Go higher and higher, until it becomes impossible to bring you down, I wanna use a microscope to locate you, don't even dream of coming down.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“I forgot what we were celebrating. Because we were always celebrating something, a new job, a new poem, a new love, a new dream.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“Celebration is an act of impressing sadistic someone residing in you.”
― Santosh Kalwar

“How did they know that I was the one who saved them?"
"They don't. You're the third knight they've celebrated over since it happened.”
― Gerald Morris, The Squire, His Knight, and His Lady

“So let’s raise our glass to the accident season,
To the river beneath us where we sink our souls,
To the bruises and secrets, to the ghosts in the ceiling,
One more drink for the watery road.”
― Moïra Fowley-Doyle

“Life is a celebration. Consider everything that makes you happy as a gift from God and say, 'Thank you.”
― Francis Lucille, The Perfume of Silence

“A lot of corpses woke up every morning from their graves. Stood in front of the mirror and wore the masks which made them look alive. Stuck in the vicious circle of death. Scared to break out and scared of falling into the infinite pit of darkness, they beat down their souls that were fighting for an escape, mercilessly every day. They walked out into the world with pain, only to return back to the home, which did not feel like a home anymore, again in the night. They removed their masks in front of the mirror, stared into those empty eyes and walked back to their graves silently, with the fear of waking up again next day and with nothing to celebrate in their heart.”
― Akshay Vasu, The Abandoned Paradise: Unraveling the beauty of untouched thoughts and dreams

“The fireworks went on for nearly half an hour, great pulsing strobes, fiery dandelions and starbursts of light brightening both sky and water. It was hard to tell which was reality and which was reflection, as if there were two displays, above and below, going on simultaneously—one in space-time, mused Max, and the other in time-space.”
― Sol Luckman, Snooze: A Story of Awakening

“The Japanese psychiatrist Kimura Bin, director of the Psychiatric Hos- pital of Kyoto and translator of Binswanger, sought to deepen Heidegger’s anal- ysis of temporality in Being and Time with reference to a classification of the fundamental types of mental illness. To this end he made use of the Latin for- mula post festum (literally, “after the celebration”), which indicates an irreparable past, an arrival at things that are already done. Post festum is symmetrically dis- tinguished from ante festum (“before the celebration”) and intra festum (“during the celebration”).
Post festum temporality is that of the melancholic, who always experiences his own “I” in the form of an “I was,” of an irrecoverably accomplished past with respect to which one can only be in debt. This experience of time corresponds in Heidegger to Dasein’s Being-thrown, its finding itself always already abandoned to a factual situation beyond which it can never venture. There is thus a kind of constitutive “melancholy” of human Dasein, which is always late with respect to itself, having always already missed its “celebration.”
Ante festum temporality corresponds to the experience of the schizophrenic, in which the direction of the melancholic’s orientation toward the past is in- verted. For the schizophrenic, the “I” is never a certain possession; it is always something to be attained, and the schizophrenic therefore always lives time in the form of anticipation. “The ‘I’ of the schizophrenic,” Kimura Bin writes, “is not the ‘I’ of the ‘already been’; it is not tied to a duty. In other words, it is not the post festum ‘I’ of the melancholic, which can only be spoken of in terms of a past and a debt. . . . Instead, the essential point here is the problem of one’s own possibility of being oneself, the problem of the certainty of becoming oneself and, therefore, the risk of possibly being alienated from oneself” (Kimura Bin 1992: 79). In Being and Time, the schizophrenic’s temporality corresponds to the primacy of the future in the form of projection and anticipation. Precisely because its experience of time originally temporalizes itself on the basis of the future, Dasein can be defined by Heidegger as “the being for whom, in its very Being, Being is always at issue” and also as “in its Being always already anticipat- ing itself.” But precisely for this reason, Dasein is constitutively schizophrenic; it always risks missing itself and not being present at its own “celebration.”
― Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer

“You are the celebrity, celebrate yourself.”
― Aesira Khan

“When I say celebrate what do I mean? I mean that whatsoever you do, don't do it as a duty, do it from your love; don't do it as a burden, do it as a celebration. You can eat as if it is a duty: long-faced, dull, dead, insensitive. You can throw food inside yourself without ever tasting, without ever feeling for it. It is life; you live through it. Don't be so insensitive to it.

Indians have said, 'anam brahman,' food is Brahman. This is celebration: you are eating brahman, you are eating God through food, because only God exists. When you are taking a shower, it is God showering because only God exists. When you go for a morning walk, it is God on a morning walk. And the breeze is also God, and the trees are also God -- everything is so Divine. How can you be a long-face, dead and dull, moving in life as if you are carrying a burden?

When I say celebrate, I mean become more and more sensitive to everything. In life, dance should not be apart. The whole life should become a dance; it should be a dance. You can go for a walk and dance.

Allow life to enter into you, become more open and vulnerable, feel more, sense more. Small things filled with such wonders are lying all around.

Watch a small child. Leave him in the garden and just watch. That should be your way also; so wonderful, wonder-filled: running to catch this butterfly, running to catch that flower, playing with mud, rolling in the sand. From everywhere the Divine is touching the child.

If you can live in wonder you will be capable of celebration. Don't live in knowledge, live in wonder.

Life is surprising; everywhere, it is a continuous surprise. Live it as a surprise, an unpredictable phenomenon: every moment is new. Just try, give it a try! You will not lose anything if you give it a try, and you may gain everything. But you have become addicted to misery. You cling to your misery as if it is something very precious.

You become cruel because you don't know how to become compassionate. It is a negative state. The same energy that is cruelty will become compassion.
With an unalert mind the energy becomes violence; with an alert mind the same energy becomes compassion. In sleep the same energy becomes torture, either of yourself or of somebody else. When you are awake, the same energy becomes love, for yourself and for others also.

You are already where you need to be, you are already in that space which you are seeking. Just make a little effort to come out of your clinging to misery.

Don't invest in misery; invest in celebration. You take one step towards life and life takes one thousand towards you.”
― Osho, Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega Volume 4

“Adelaide loved the idea of celebrating the day a person entered the world.”
― Genevieve Wheeler, Adelaide

“Angie carries her joy, wherever she goes. You see, the secret of Angie, is something few know.”
― Karen Brough, Angie Loves to Dance: Finding Joy in Life's Adventures

“Not the shoes on her feet, or the clothes that she wears, but the abundant joy she shares everywhere.”
― Karen Brough, Angie Loves to Dance: Finding Joy in Life's Adventures

“Carry the joy in your heart, it's always with you, even on the days where you might feel a little blue.”
― Karen Brough, Angie Loves to Dance: Finding Joy in Life's Adventures

“Each day is a gift, a day like never before.”
― Karen Brough, Angie Loves to Dance: Finding Joy in Life's Adventures

“Whatever you do, please do remember, whichever shoes you wear, enjoy the adventure.”
― Karen Brough, Angie Loves to Dance: Finding Joy in Life's Adventures

“When Terlu had woken alone in the cold snow, she hadn't expected to be a part of a full-out Winter Feast celebration the very same season. She hadn't expected any of what had happened. She supposed that was why today mattered so much to her: it was a day to celebrate the improbable light that now burned in the implacable darkness.”
― Sarah Beth Durst, The Enchanted Greenhouse