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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:

Magnificent spectacle of human happiness.

Sydney Smith

Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love, and to be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence.

Sydney Smith Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

Time, which strengthens friendship, weakens love.

Jean de La Bruyère Les Caractères (1688)

Minor things can become moments of great revelation when encountered for the very first time.

Margot Fonteyn Margot Fonteyn : Autobiography‎ (1975)

No man loves life like him that's growing old.

Sophocles

Be ruled by time, the wisest counsellor of all.

Plutarch

The heart opens itself to the hope that the misfortunes of the past will be replaced by fruitful dialogue.

Elio Toaff

Happiness is not an end — it is only a means, and adjunct, a consequence.

Dinah Craik A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)

The only way to make people good, is to make them happy.

Dinah Craik A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)

All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.

Thomas Pynchon Against the Day (2006)

If you go looking for a friend, you’re going to find they’re very scarce. If you go out to be a friend, you’ll find them everywhere.

Zig Ziglar The Power of Respect : Benefit from the Most Forgotten Element of Success (2009)

Happiness exists on earth, and it is won through prudent exercise of reason, knowledge of the harmony of the universe, and constant practice of generosity.

José Martí Martí : Thoughts/Pensamientos (1994)

Everybody has to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?

William Saroyan

That Action is best, which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers; and that worst, which, in like manner, occasions Misery.

Francis Hutcheson An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725)

Beauty is momentary in the mind —
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body's beauty lives.

Wallace Stevens Harmonium (1923)

Happiness lies only in a divine unrest; and if you are lapped in comfort you stagnate and miss it.

John Buchan A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906)

With God, every moment is the moment of beginning again.

Catherine Doherty

To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent—that is to triumph over old age.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich Ponkapog Papers (1903)

The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank blooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen.

Thomas Hardy The Return of the Native (1878)

There is an old age which has more youth of heart than youth itself!

Edward Bulwer-Lytton Alice, or The Mysteries (1838)

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