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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.

Random quote on Birthday

Most quoted on birthday:

Happiness is a battle to be waged and not a feeling to be awaited.

Dennis Prager Happiness is a Serious Problem (1998)

But, O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man's eyes!

William Shakespeare

Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to vulgar taste.

Logan Pearsall Smith Afterthoughts (1931)

Happiness does not depend on the size or content of a goal, but on the strength of the desire to have it.

Simon Soloveychik Parenting for Everyone (1989)

Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness.

Samuel Johnson

Thus we never live, but we hope to live; and always disposing ourselves to be happy, it is inevitable that we never become so.

Blaise Pascal

Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it, and by no means in the way the future keeps its promises.

George Sand

Happiness is not perfected until it is shared.

Jane Porter

After all, joy and sorrow are often arbitrary, largely states of mind; nowhere is it written that joy must accompany victory and sorrow defeat.

Thomas Boswell Why Time Begins on Opening Day (1984)

I never look back, darling; it distracts from the now.

Brad Bird lines for Edna Mode in The Incredibles (2004)

Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1891)

My call is not to those who believe they belong to the past. My call is to those who believe in the future.

John F. Kennedy

How simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. ... All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart.

Nikos Kazantzakis Zorba the Greek (1946)

The present moment
contains past and future.
The secret of transformation,
is in the way we handle this very moment.

Thích Nhất Hạnh Understanding Our Mind (2006)

Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

R. S. Thomas Laboratories of the Spirit (1975)

We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.

James Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D (1791)

One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Robert Frost West-Running Brook (1928)

When a child who has been conceived in love is born to a man and a woman, the joy of that birth sings throughout the universe.

Madeleine L'Engle A Circle of Quiet (1972)

If our friends do us a service, we think they owe it to us by their title of friend. We never think that they do not owe us their friendship.

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues Reflections and Maxims (1746)

On Being Old. It's not nice but take comfort that you won't stay that way for ever.

J. P. Donleavy

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