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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:

While we spoke of many things
Fools and kings
This he said to me:
"The greatest thing you'll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return."

Eden ahbez Nature Boy (1948)

The year was woven on the loom, finished and folded away upon the pile of other years in the tall chests of Time.

Tanith Lee Night's Master (1978)

Love naturally reverses the idea of obedience, and causes the struggle between any two people who truly love each other to be not who shall command, but, who shall yield.

Frances Power Cobbe The Duties of Women (1881)

One understands time when there is no time.

Hossein Nuri Turning Fear Into Power (2014)

When Divine providence graces you, and you are endowed with passion of love and alienated from your ego, at that time Divine love enters your inmost being and He shows His Beauty to you.

Bu Ali Shah Qalandar The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004)

To remain satisfied and grateful for the pleasure of the Beloved, at the cost of religion and heart is necessarily passionate love, which in Sufi terminology is called faithfulness.

Bu Ali Shah Qalandar The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004)

I have been in love, and in debt, and in drink,
This many and many a year.

Alexander Brome

It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.

Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)

A labyrinth of symbols... An invisible labyrinth of time.

Jorge Luis Borges The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)

Each and every master, regardless of the era or the place, heard the call and attained harmony with heaven and earth. There are many paths leading to the top of Mount Fuji, but there is only one summit — love.

Morihei Ueshiba

Sense of wrongs forget to treasure—
Brethren, live in perfect love!
In the starry realms above,
God will mete as we may measure.

Friedrich Schiller An die Freude (Ode to Joy; or Hymn to Joy) (1785)

It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.

Thornton Wilder The Eighth Day (1967)

In spite of its size and range, this is […] a personal essay. It is a Time-haunted man addressing himself chiefly to all those people he knows from experience to be also Time-haunted.

J. B. Priestley Man and Time (1964)

We of the Shroud tend to believe in teaching those things we know we can teach, and in affairs of the heart—or gonads—there are no real experts. Love, like zen, cannot be learned, only felt.

Steve Perry The Man Who Never Missed (1985)

Love is of two natures; the love which is tranquil, which is found among both the elect and the common folk, and the love which is rapture, which is found only among the elect. This is road which leads direct to God.

Abu Bakr al-Kalabadhi The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004)

To one who asked what was the proper time for lunch, he said, "If a rich man, when you will; if a poor man, when you can."

Diogenes of Sinope

Not to be loved is a misfortune, but it is an insult to be loved no longer.

Montesquieu Lettres Persanes (1721)

There's no more to Holden Caulfield. Read the book again. It's all there. Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time.

J. D. Salinger

There's only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I'll get married again.

Clint Eastwood

For winning love we win the risk of losing,
And losing love is as one's life were riven.

Thomas Hardy Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

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