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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:

Agape is something of the understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. It is a love that seeks nothing in return. It is an overflowing love; it’s what theologians would call the love of God working in the lives of men. And when you rise to love on this level, you begin to love men, not because they are likeable, but because God loves them.

Martin Luther King Jr.

For true evangelical faith...cannot lay dormant; but manifests itself in all righteousness and works of love; it...clothes the naked; feeds the hungry; consoles the afflicted; shelters the miserable; aids and consoles all the oppressed; returns good for evil; serves those that injure it; prays for those that persecute it.

Menno Simons

Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more Perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might be found more suitable mates. But the real soul-mate is the one you are actually married to.

J. R. R. Tolkien

In every bit of honest writing in the world ... there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love.

John Steinbeck Journal entry (1938)

Love is always new. Regardless of whether we love once, twice, or a dozen times in our life, we always face a brand-new situation. Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere.

Paulo Coelho By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994)

The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s Presence, Which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all encompassing can have no opposite.

Helen Schucman

Of the systems above us, angelic and seraphic, we know little; but we see one law, simple, efficient, and comprehensive as that of gravitation,— the law of love,— extending its sway over the whole of God's dominions, living where He lives, embracing every moral movement in its universal authority, and producing the same harmony, where it is obeyed as we observe in the movements of nature.

Mark Hopkins Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Beyond the grave! As the vision rises how this side dwindles into nothing — a speck — a moment — and its glory and pomp shrink into the trinkets and baubles that amuse an infant for a day. Only those things, in the glory of this light, which lay hold of immortality, seem to have any value.

Randolph Sinks Foster Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride, which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife.

Nikola Tesla My Inventions (1919)

The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter — and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing

Omar Khayyám

This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel,
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.

J. R. R. Tolkien

He more we live, more brief appear
Our life's succeeding stages;
A day to childhood seems a year,
And years like passing ages.

Thomas Campbell

The present is our own; but while we speak,
We cease from its possession, and resign
The stage we tread on, to another race,
As vain, and gay, and mortal as ourselves.

Thomas Love Peacock

Expect, but fear not, Death: Death cannot kill,
Till Time (that first must seal his patent) will.
Would'st thou live long? keep Time in high esteem:
Whom gone, if thou canst not recall, redeem.

Francis Quarles

Wooing thee, I found thee of more value
Than stamps in gold or sums in sealed bags;
And 'tis the very riches of thyself
That now I aim at.

William Shakespeare

Never wedding, ever wooing,
Still a lovelorn heart pursuing,
Read you not the wrong you're doing
In my cheek's pale hue?
All my life with sorrow strewing;
Wed or cease to woo.

Thomas Campbell

The nightingales among the sheltering boughs
Of populous many-nested trees
Shall teach me how to woo thee, and shall tell me
By what resistless charms or incantations
They won their mates.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

That you are in a terrible taking,
By all these sweet oglings I see;
But the fruit that can fall without shaking,
Indeed is too mellow for me.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Love causes man to find fulfillment through the sincere gift of self. To love means to give and to receive something which can be neither bought nor sold, but only given freely and mutually

Pope John Paul II

[A]t the crossroads of our history, we need to turn our backs on the past.

F. W. de Klerk

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