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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:

Wouldst thou learn thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt learn and know more in the same. But thou shalt never know nor learn therein other thing without end. Thus was I learned that Love was our Lord’s meaning.

Julian of Norwich Revelations of Divine Love (1393)

You ought to love all mankind; nay, every individual of mankind. You ought not to love the individuals of your domestic circles less, but to love those who exist beyond it more. Once make the feelings of confidence and of affection universal, and the distinctions of property and power will vanish; nor are they to be abolished without substituting something equivalent in mischief to them, until all mankind shall acknowledge an entire community of rights.

Percy Bysshe Shelley Essay on Christianity (1859)

Genuine love is never love of one's self but love of another "person." The greatest love is the love of God, and the lasting "marital" love between the sexes overbridging the immense psychological abyss between man and woman is not unrelated to the love of God; it is basically the love for one of His children. The very delight in the otherness of the beloved person is a tacit, loving recognition of God's all-embracing greatness. True love between man and woman accepts the mysterious variety of God's creation whose harmony even original sin did not entirely destroy.

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn The Menace of the Herd (1943)

Somewhere there waiteth in this world of ours
For one lone soul another lonely soul,
Each choosing each through all the weary hours,
And meeting strangely at one sudden goal,
Then blend they, like green leaves with golden flowers,
Into one beautiful and perfect whole;
And life's long night is ended, and the way
Lies open onward to eternal day.

Edwin Arnold

the word love/will rise from the earth/in an innocent volcano/that renews universes

Julia de Burgos Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos (1982)

That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb,—for we have no word to speak about it.

Thomas Carlyle Heroes and Hero Worship (1840)

But in vain did she conjure him
To depart her presence so,
Having a thousand tongues t'allure him,
And but one to bid him go.

Walter Raleigh

Studies of infants in institutions have shown that the development of normal intelligence requires human interaction. Without love, without input and response from the world, we can make no sense of the world. Retardation is the result for babies who are fed but not played with, safe but not spoken to. An atmosphere of trust, love, and humor can nourish extraordinary human capacity.

Marilyn Ferguson The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980)

I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

Jesus

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. . . . It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more.

Erica Jong

Love is treacherous to those who fear, since fear and hate can never be apart. No one who hates but is afraid of love, and therefore must he be afraid of God. Certain it is he knows not what love means. He fears to love and loves to hate, and so he thinks that love is fearful; hate is love.

Helen Schucman A Course in Miracles (1976)

If we conceive that anyone loves, desires, or hates anything which we ourselves love, desire, or hate, we shall thereupon regard the thing in question with more steadfast love, etc. On the contrary, if we think that anyone shrinks from something that we love, we shall undergo vacillation of the soul.

Baruch Spinoza

Some people have been trying for centuries to love their neighbor as themselves. But they have been finding it difficult because loving your neighbor as yourself really means, first of all, you need to be in touch with yourself, the self that you are beyond the form. And then you can love your neighbor as yourself because you recognize your oneness with your neighbor.

Eckhart Tolle

Those who are engaged to marry are called to live chastity in continence. They should see in this time of testing a discovery of mutual respect, an apprenticeship in fidelity, and the hope of receiving one another from God. They should reserve for marriage the expressions of affection that belong to married love. They will help each other grow in chastity.

Pope John Paul II

I would not marry her, though she were endowed with all that Adam had left him before he transgressed: she would have made Hercules have turned spit, yea, and have cleft his club to make the fire too. * * * I would to God some scholar would conjure her; for certainly, while she is here, a man may live as quiet in hell as in a sanctuary.

William Shakespeare

Being married to those sleepy-souled women is just like playing at cards for nothing: no passion is excited and the time is filled up. I do not, however, envy a fellow one of those honeysuckle wives for my part, as they are but creepers at best and commonly destroy the tree they so tenderly cling about.

Samuel Johnson

Light household duties evermore inwrought
With placid fancies of one trusting heart
That lives but in her smile, and turns
From Life's cold seeming, and the busy mart,
With tenderness, that ever homeward yearns
To be refreshed where one pure altar burns.
Shut out from hence, the mockery of life—
Thus liveth she content, the meek, fond, trusting wife.

Elizabeth Oakes Smith

Truly, if at one time it was difficult to become a Christian, I believe now it becomes more difficult year by year, because it has now become so easy to become one; there is a bit of competition only in becoming a speculative thinker. … The thesis that God has existed in human form, was born, grew up; is certainly the paradox in the strictest sense, the absolute paradox.

Søren Kierkegaard Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (1846)

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things.

Zhuangzi

it's love by whom (my beautiful friend) the gift to live is without until:
...love was and shall be this only truth (a dream of a deed, born not to die)

E. E. Cummings

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