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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:

Used to have friends, now I've got enemies. Used to keep them close, now they're dead to me.

Post Malone

Old friends are the great blessing of one's latter years—half a word conveys one's meaning. They have memory of the same events, and have the same mode of thinking.

Horace Walpole

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

John Steinbeck

Are you done with reviews and criticisms of life? animating now to life itself?

Walt Whitman

There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future.

John F. Kennedy

Believing that the happiness of mankind is best promoted by the useful pursuits of peace, that on these alone a stable prosperity can be founded, that the evils of war are great in their endurance, and have a long reckoning for ages to come, I have used my best endeavors to keep our country uncommitted in the troubles which afflict Europe, and which assail us on every side.

Thomas Jefferson

What we must learn to do is to create unbreakable bonds between the sciences and the humanities. We cannot procrastinate. The world of the future is in our making. Tomorrow is now.

Eleanor Roosevelt Tomorrow Is Now (1963)

We don't beat the reaper by living longer, but by living well, and living fully — for the reaper will come for all of us. The question is: what do we do between the time we're born and the time he shows up.

Randy Pausch CMU Graduation speech (2008)

A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man, that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of his friends, and that the most liberal professions of good will are very far from being the surest marks of it.

George Washington

You read the face of the sky and of the earth, but you have not recognized the one who is before you, and you do not know how to read this moment. (91)

Jesus

I think we agree, the past is over.

George W. Bush

Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,
Nor a friend to know me;
All I ask, the heaven above
And the road below me.

Robert Louis Stevenson Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896)

Time past on as lightly as he always steps over flowers, Brussels carpets, marble terraces, green turfs, or whatever simile may best express a path without an impediment.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Pain is short, and joy is eternal.

Friedrich Schiller The Maid of Orleans (1801)

Take all the pleasures of all the spheres,
And multiply each through endless years,—
One minute of heaven is worth them all.

Thomas Moore Lalla Rookh (1817)

"Wal'r, my boy," replied the Captain, "in the Proverbs of Solomon you will find the following words, 'May we never want a friend in need, nor a bottle to give him!' When found, make a note of."

Charles Dickens Dombey and Son (1846)

The ages roll
Forward; and, forward with them, draw my soul
Into Time’s infinite sea.
And to be glad or sad I care no more:
But to have done, and to have been, before
I cease to do and be!

Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton The Wanderer (1859)

I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succoured thee: behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.

Paul of Tarsus

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.

Simone de Beauvoir The Coming of Age (1970)

He was by himself always. Remote, detached, aloof. Seeing past everyone and everything — that is, until all at once something clicked and he momentarily rephased, reentered their world briefly.

Philip K. Dick The Golden Man (1954)

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