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:
No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace,
As I have seen in one autumnal face.
Endure the hardships of your present state,
Live, and reserve yourselves for better fate.
Thus happiness depends, as Nature shows,
Less on exterior things than most suppose.
Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form.
Age too shines out: and, garrulous, recounts the feats of youth.
Turn money into time – especially important for people with kids.
Joys too exquisite to last,
And yet more exquisite when past.
For happiness, she also required work to do in this world and bread on the table.
Now I was stuck and could feel the tide of years suddenly beginning to rise around me.
Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn.
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.
Whatever with the past has gone
the best is always yet to come.
All my life I've been taught how to die, but no one ever taught me how to grow old.