Remember always your end, and that lost time does not return.
Birthday Quotes
Birthday quotes here lean towards reflection rather than celebration. The page is built from the pages on age, time, friendship and happiness, and Shakespeare has the most entries, then Byron, Edward Young and Longfellow.
That is useful if you want something thoughtful for a milestone birthday and less so for a card with balloons on it. The funny ones are on the Funny page. A warning on the friendship quotes: “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer” is not from Sun Tzu, and “Time flies like an arrow” was not said by Groucho Marx. Both are flagged here.
Most quoted on birthday:
I’ve climbed up here
holding the hilt of time’s sword
after driving it
into my tender heart.
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
The past and future are veiled; but the past wears the widow's veil; the future, the virgin's.
'Thou canst not joke an Enemy into a Friend; but thou may'st a Friend into an Enemy.
There are three faithful friends,
an old wife, an old dog, and ready money.
The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
A sound mind in a sound body, is a short but full description of a happy state in this world.
It is a maxim of old that among themselves all things are common to friends.