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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:

What am I singing? A song of seeds — The food of love. Eat the music.

Kate Bush

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

T. S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)

Lady of the Mere,
Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance.

William Wordsworth Lyrical Ballads (1798)

For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.

William Wordsworth Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed (1919)

Endure the hardships of your present state,
Live, and reserve yourselves for better fate.

John Dryden The Works of Virgil (1697)

The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.

Edgar Allan Poe The Philosophy of Composition (1846)

Love reduces the complexity of living.

Anaïs Nin Diary entries (1914)

The acquisition of any knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it may thus drive out useless things and retain the good. For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.

Leonardo da Vinci The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883)

There is no gift more great than love.

James Branch Cabell The Silver Stallion (1926)

Some day, the world will discover that, without thought, there can be no love.

Ayn Rand Apollo and Dionysus (1969)

My heart, the bird of the wilderness, has found its sky in your eyes.

Rabindranath Tagore The Gardener (1915)

Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment.

Wendell Berry What Are People For? (1990)

I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.

Wendell Berry Another Turn of the Crank (1996)

Drink, my jolly lads, drink with discerning,
Wedlock's a lane where there is no turning;
Never was owl more blind than a lover,
Drink and be merry, lads, half seas over.

Dinah Craik Thirty Years, Being Poems New and Old (1880)

Happiest is he who expects no happiness from others. Love delights and glorifies in giving, not receiving. So learn to love and give, and not to expect anything from others.

Meher Baba Lord Meher (1986)

Time rolls his ceaseless course.

Walter Scott The Lady of the Lake (1810)

'T is just like a summer bird-cage in a garden,—the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out.

John Webster The White Devil (1612)

Love comes unseen,—we only see it go.

Henry Austin Dobson Vignettes in Rhyme and Vers de Societé (1873)

Turn money into time – especially important for people with kids.

Randy Pausch Time Management (2007)

Spirituality tells the seeker not to live in the hoary past, not to live in the remote future, but to live in the immediacy of today, in the eternal Now.

Sri Chinmoy Everest Aspiration (1977)

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