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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:

One wife is too much for most husbands to bear,
But two at a time there's no mortal can bear.

John Gay Beggar's Opera (1728)

One thing alone not even God can do,
To make undone whatever hath been done.

Aristotle

Now that I've met you,
Would you object to
Never seeing each other again?

Aimee Mann

Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past — let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

John F. Kennedy

What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love.

Leonard Cohen Beautiful Losers (1966)

It’s not until they tell you you’re going to die soon that you realize how short life is. Time is the most valuable thing in life because it never comes back. And whether you spend it in the arms of a loved one or alone in a prison-cell, life is what you make of it. Dream big.

Stefán Karl Stefánsson

The past is to be respected and acknowledged, but not to be worshipped. It is our future in which we will find our greatness.

Pierre Trudeau

O Time! consumer of all things; O envious age! thou dost destroy all things and devour all things with the relentless teeth of years, little by little in a slow death.

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

What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair...Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.

Ursula K. Le Guin The Farthest Shore (1972)

Love is not a feeling to pass away,
Like the balmy breath of a summer day;
It is not — it cannot be — laid aside;
It is not a thing to forget or hide.

Charles Dickens Lucy's Song in The Village Coquettes (1836)

It must be obvious... that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.

Alan Watts The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951)

If the learned and worldly-wise men of this age were to allow mankind to inhale the fragrance of fellowship and love, every understanding heart would apprehend the meaning of true liberty, and discover the secret of undisturbed peace and absolute composure.

Bahá'u'lláh

Love is... born with the pleasure of looking at each other, it is fed with the necessity of seeing each other, it is concluded with the impossibility of separation!

José Martí Amor (1887)

The free, creative, loving people who shine so brightly in my memory of studios and coffee shops have become models for a huge section of the population. If they in turn can just stay alive in the face of power and terror, they may become the decisive section.

Kenneth Rexroth An Autobiographical Novel (1991)

When we "fall" in love, as the expressive verb puts it, the world shakes and changes around us, not only in the way it looks but in our whole experience of what we are doing in the world.

Rollo May Love and Will (1969)

A bachelor
May thrive by observation, on a little.
A single life's no burden: but to draw
In yokes is chargeable, and will require
A double maintenance.

John Ford

The Pythagoreans called the monad "intellect" because they thought that intellect was akin to the One; for among the virtues, they likened the monad to moral wisdom; for what is correct is one.

Iamblichus

"To fall for," "to be fallen for"—I feel in these words something unspeakably vulgar, farcical, and at the same time extraordinarily complacent.

Osamu Dazai

I want to see what is there in the heart! Natural curiosity!

Laxmi Prasad Devkota

Time had passed. It will, given half the chance.

Esther Friesner A Pig's Tale (1995)

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