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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:

New times demand new measures and new men;
The world advances, and in time outgrows
The laws which in our father's times were best;
And doubtless, after us, some purer scheme
Will be shaped out by wiser men than we,
Made wiser by the steady growth of truth.

James Russell Lowell Poems (1844)

Actions done against the will of the heart never bring good to anyone. Refusing may bring pain for a while, just for a moment, but agreeing to something merely to please someone aches forever and hurts everyone."

Sanu Sharma

Love is no ingredient in a merely speculative faith, but it is the life and soul of a practical faith... A speculative faith consists only in the assent of the understanding, but in a saving faith there is also the consent of the heart.

Jonathan Edwards Charity and Its Fruits (1738)

Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
Do not be forever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust:
Thou know'st tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.

William Shakespeare

If you die, I will lie down beside you and I will stay there until the end, without eating or drinking, you will rot in my arms and I will love you as carcass: for you love nothing if you do not love everything.

Jean-Paul Sartre The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.

Jean-Paul Sartre The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.

Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov (1879)

...the madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings...

Plato

Time is at once an agony of the Present, a long torment of the Past and the terrible prospect of countless Futures. Time is also a complex of subtly intersecting realities, of unguessable consequences and undiscoverable causes, of profound tensions and dependencies.

Michael Moorcock The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

Love is the only thing that will save us, independent of any mistakes we may make. Love is always stronger.

Paulo Coelho Aleph (2011)

In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.

Mary Renault The Mask of Apollo (1966)

Eternity invests every state, whether of bliss or of suffering, with a mysterious and awful importance, entirely its own. It gives that weight and moment to whatever it attaches, compared to which all interests that know a period fade into absolute insignificance.

Robert Hall Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

If we consider eternity, into that time never entered; eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is as a short parenthesis in a long period; and eternity had been the same as it is, though time had never been.

John Donne

The light
Begin to bleed,
Begin to breathe,
Begin to speak.
D'you know what?
I love you better now.

Kate Bush

Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.

Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957)

For none can express thee, though all should approve thee.
I love thee so, Dear, that I only can love thee.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Behold me! I am worthy
Of thy loving, for I love thee!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

My Lesbia, let us live and love.

Catullus

I hate and I love. Why do I do so you perhaps ask.
I cannot say; but I feel it to be so, and I am tormented accordingly.

Catullus

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