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:
The end crowns all;
And that old common arbitrator, Time,
Will one day end it.
As we speak cruel time is fleeing. Seize the day, believing as little as possible in the morrow.
The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing.
A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.
Now, if the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would amount to the same.
The four eights, that ideal of operative felicity, are here (New Zealand) a realized fact.