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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:

The poor make no new friends;
But oh, they love the better still
The few our Father sends.

Helen Blackwood, Baroness Dufferin and Claneboye

A generous friendship no cold medium knows,
Burns with one love, with one resentment glows;
One should our interests and our passions be,
My friend must hate the man that injures me.

Homer

Choose for your friend him that is wise and good, and secret and just, ingenious and honest, and in those things which have a latitude, use your own liberty.

Jeremy Taylor

Then came your new friend: you began to change—
I saw it and grieved.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson The Princess (1847)

Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

H. L. Mencken

Priestly was the first (unless it was Beccaria) who taught my lips to pronounce this sacred truth—that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.

Jeremy Bentham

The message from the hedge-leaves,
Heed it, whoso thou art;
Under lowly eaves
Lives the happy heart.

John Vance Cheney

Said Scopas of Thessaly, "But we rich men count our felicity and happiness to lie in these superfluities, and not in those necessary things."

Plutarch

Mankind are always happier for having been happy; so that if you make them happy now, you make them happy twenty years hence by the memory of it.

Sydney Smith

Be happy, but be happy through piety.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël Corinne (1807)

For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.

William Shakespeare

Not heaven itself upon the past has power;
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

John Dryden Imitation of Horace (1685)

Weep no more, lady, weep no more,
Thy sorrowe is in vaine,
For violets pluckt, the sweetest showers
Will ne'er make grow againe.

Thomas Percy

The eternal landscape of the past.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson In Memoriam A.H.H (1849)

I, who have not cried since my childhood, I cry now like a child because of all that I shall never have. I cry over lost beauty and grandeur. I love everything that I should have embraced.

Henri Barbusse The Inferno (1917)

Though you are as honest as the day, fear and hate the liar. Fear and hate him when he should be feared and hated:now. Fear and hate him were he should be feared and hated:in yourselves.

E. E. Cummings an essay in the anthology The War Poets (1945)

And the 24 elders and the four living creatures fell down and worshipped God who sits on the throne and said: “Amen! Praise Jah!” Also, a voice came from the throne and said: “Be praising our God, all you his slaves, who fear him, the small ones and the great.”

John the Evangelist

The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.

C. S. Lewis The World's Last Night (1952)

He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend.
Eternity mourns that. ’Tis an ill cure
For life’s worst ills, to have no time to feel them.
Where sorrow ’s held intrusive and turned out,
There wisdom will not enter, nor true power,
Nor aught that dignifies humanity.

Henry Taylor Philip van Artevelde (1834)

The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation. … Both are illusions.

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now (1997)

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