Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years; people grow old by deserting their ideals.
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:
Pure friendship is something which men of an inferior intellect can never taste.
Little is needed to make a wise man happy, but nothing can content a fool.
Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.
All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart.
Think where man's glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.
Unless you bear with the faults of a friend, you betray your own.
Eternity is a child playing, playing checkers; the kingdom belongs to a child.
Believe me, wise men don't say ‘I shall live to do that’, tomorrow's life is too late; live today.
It may be that in the future you will be helped by remembering the past.
Neither will the wave which has passed be called back; nor can the hour which has gone by return.
Alluring pleasure is said to have softened the savage dispositions (of early mankind).