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Anniversary Quotes

There is no anniversary collection behind this page. It is put together from the pages on love, marriage, romance and time, then sorted by quality, so what comes up first is whatever those four pages rate highest.

Expect poems and passages from novels more than card lines. Some of the best material here only works with the sentences around it, which is why each quote links to its own page with the source and the notes. If you plan to put one in print, check the flag first: a line marked misattributed is fine to enjoy and risky to credit.

Random quote on Anniversary

Most quoted on anniversary:

love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun, more last than star

E. E. Cummings

Love unifies by individuating and individuates by unifying. At what moment do lovers come into the most perfect possession of themselves as individuals if not when they are most lost in each other? Self, is given up, but "he who loses his self will find it." [Matthew 16:25]

Peter Kreeft

The idea that time may be an active factor in causation has the mathematical significance that ' t ' (for the system in question) must appear explicitly in the formulation of the law. ...Such law may claim to express the fact of historic, irreversible duration.

Lancelot Law Whyte Archimedes or the Future of Physics (1927)

I used to think
I had the answers to everything
But now I know
Life doesn't always
Go my way, yeah
Feels like I'm caught in the middle
That's when I realize
I'm not a girl
Not yet a woman
All I need is time
A moment that is mine
While I'm in between

Britney Spears

Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.
. . . . . .
Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore:—
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.

Richard Lovelace

Begin, be bold, and venture to be wise,
He who defers this work from day to day,
Does on a river's bank expecting stay,
Till the whole stream, which stopped him, should be gone,
That runs, and as it runs, for ever will run on.

Abraham Cowley

A handful of red sand from the hot clime
Of Arab deserts brought,
Within this glass becomes the spy of Time,
The minister of Thought.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Then gazing up 'mid the dim pillars high,
The foliaged marble forest where ye lie,
Hush, ye will say, it is eternity!
This is the glimmering verge of heaven, and there
The columns of the heavenly palaces.

Matthew Arnold

I have seen the truth... It is not as though I had invented it with my mind. I have seen it, seen it, and the living image of it has filled my soul forever.... In one day, one hour, everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky Marilyn Ferguson in The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980)

David Xanatos: So, now you know my weakness.

Goliath

That they may not become too complacent or delighted in married life, he makes them distressed by the shortcomings of their partners, or humbles them through willful offspring, or afflicts them with the want or loss of children. But, if in all these matters he is more merciful to them, he shows them by diseases and dangers how unstable and passing all mortal blessings are, that they may not be puffed up with vain glory.

John Calvin

Children should above all be taught self-reliance, love for all men, altruism, mutual charity, and more than anything else, to think and reason for themselves... Aim at creating free men and women, free intellectually, free morally, unprejudiced in all respects, and above all things, unselfish.

Helena Blavatsky The Key to Theosophy (1889)

There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
She is coming, my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, "She is near, she is near;"
And the white rose weeps, "She is late;"
The larkspur listens, "I hear, I hear;"
And the lily whispers, "I wait."

Alfred, Lord Tennyson Maud; A Monodrama (1855)

The more you observe life in relation to yourself the more you will see the fact that you are hardly ever correct when you think about something in the future. The future exists only in imagination; and that is why, no matter how hard you try to imagine it, you will not be able to predict the future with total certainty.

Barry Long Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future? [...] Nevertheless the past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now.

Jawaharlal Nehru

You beg for happiness in life, but security is more important to you, even if it costs you your spine or your life. Your life will be good and secure when aliveness will mean more to you than security; love more than money; your freedom more than party line or public opinion; when your thinking will be in harmony with your feelings; when the teachers of your children will be better paid than the politicians; when you will have more respect for the love between man and woman than for a marriage license.

Wilhelm Reich Listen, Little Man! (1948)

When I fall in love, I feel more valuable and I treat myself with more care. We have all observed the hesitant adolescent, uncertain of himself, who, when he or she falls in love, suddenly walks with a certain inner assuredness and confidence, a mien which seems to say, "You are looking at somebody now." … this inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not.

Rollo May Love and Will (1969)

Only love makes fruitful the soul. The sense of form that both had in such high degree prevented much demonstration; but to be with him, do things for him, to admire, and credit him with perfection; and, since she could not exactly wear the same clothes or speak in the same clipped, quiet, decisive voice, to dislike the clothes and voices of other men — all this was precious to her beyond everything.

John Galsworthy Beyond (1917)

In the spirit of faith let us begin each day, and we shall be sure to "redeem the time" which it brings to us, by changing it into something definite and eternal. There is a deep meaning in this phrase of the apostle, to redeem time. We redeem time, and do not merely use it. We transform it into eternity by living it aright.

James Freeman Clarke Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

What is it that is never changed even though everything is changed? It is love. And only that which never becomes something else is love, that which gives away everything and for that reason demands nothing, that which demands nothing and therefore has nothing to lose, that which blesses and blesses when it is cursed, that which loves its neighbor but whose enemy is also its neighbor, that which leaves revenge to the Lord because it takes comfort in the thought that he is even more merciful.

Søren Kierkegaard

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