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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 is time? It is a serpent which eats its tail [...].

Kurt Vonnegut

While I am speaking the hour flies.

Ovid

The swift hour flies on double wings.

Seneca the Younger

Quiet, Robin, quiet!
You lovers are such clumsy summer-flies,
Forever buzzing at your lady's face.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.

Jesus

We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love the brethren. He who does not love his brother abides in death.

John the Evangelist

He loves little who loves by rule.

Michel de Montaigne

He who has fostered the sweet poison of love by fondling it, finds it too late to refuse the yoke which he has of his own accord assumed.

Seneca the Younger

The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife.

Paul of Tarsus

In the election of a wife, as in
A project of war, to err but once is
To be undone forever.

Thomas Middleton

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

John Steinbeck

Are you done with reviews and criticisms of life? animating now to life itself?

Walt Whitman

There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future.

John F. Kennedy

Every man's life (and … every woman's life), awaits the hour of blossoming that makes it immortal … love is a divinity above all accidents, and guards his own with extraordinary obstinacy.

Eleanor Farjeon Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard (1922)

Daughter of Jove, relentless power,
Thou tamer of the human breast,
Whose iron scourge and tort'ring hour
The bad affright, afflict the best!

Thomas Gray

What we must learn to do is to create unbreakable bonds between the sciences and the humanities. We cannot procrastinate. The world of the future is in our making. Tomorrow is now.

Eleanor Roosevelt Tomorrow Is Now (1963)

Give of thy love, nor wait to know the worth
Of what thou lovest; and ask no returning.
And wheresoe'er thy pathway leads on earth,
There thou shalt find the lamp of love-light burning.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox New Thought Pastels (1913)

Once for all, then, a short precept is given thee: Love, and do what thou wilt: whether thou hold thy peace, through love hold thy peace; whether thou cry out, through love cry out; whether thou correct, through love correct; whether thou spare, through love do thou spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.

Augustine of Hippo

To love is to risk not being loved in return. To hope is to risk pain. To try is to risk failure, but risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.

Leo Buscaglia Living, Loving, and Learning (1982)

Werther had a love for Charlotte
Such as words could never utter;
Would you know how first he met her?
She was cutting bread and butter.

William Makepeace Thackeray Ballads (1855)

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