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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:

Time, the devourer of all things.

Ovid

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitudes;
Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour'd
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done.

William Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida (1602)

Ah, no! the conquest was obtained with ease;
He pleased you by not studying to please.

George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton

O blest retirement! friend to life's decline—
Retreats from care, that never must be mine
How blest is he who crowns, in shades like these,
A youth of labour with an age of ease!

Oliver Goldsmith The Deserted Village (1770)

When you try to conceal your wrinkles, Polla, with paste made from beans, you deceive yourself, not me. Let a defect, which is possibly but small, appear undisguised. A fault concealed is presumed to be great.

Martial

Your friends are three and your enemies arc (also) three. Your friends are: your friend, your friend's friend and your enemy's enemy. And your enemies are: your enemy, your friend's enemy and your enemy's friend.

Ali

Our friends early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas, which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take a single step that would bring them there.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays (1841)

Diem adimere aegritudinem hominibus.

Terence

Our yesterdays present irreparable things to us; it is true that we have lost opportunities which will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ. Leave the Irreparable Past in His hands, and step out into the Irresistible Future with Him.

Oswald Chambers My Utmost for His Highest (1956)

Awakening as a future event has no meaning because awakening is the realization of Presence. So the new heaven, the awakened consciousness, is not a future state to be achieved. A new heaven and a new earth are arising within you at this moment, and if they are not arising at this moment, they are no more than a thought in your head and therefore not arising at all.

Eckhart Tolle A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (2005)

We ought to esteem him alone an agreeable and good-natured man, who, in his daily intercourse with others, behaves in such a manner as friends usually behave to each other. For as a person of that rustic character appears, wherever he comes, like a mere stranger: so, on the contrary, a polite man, wherever he goes, seems as easy as if he were amongst his intimate friends and acquaintance.

Giovanni della Casa

If you made a mistake in the past and learn from it now, you are using clock time. On the other hand, if you dwell on it mentally, and self-criticism, remorse, or guilt come up, then you are making the mistake into “me” and “mine”: you make it part of your sense of self, and it has become psychological time, which is always linked to a false sense of identity.

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1997)

I thought you and he were hand-in-glove.

Jonathan Swift Polite Conversation (1738)

Joy, in Nature's wide dominion,
Mightiest cause of all is found;
And 'tis joy that moves the pinion,
When the wheel of time goes round

Friedrich Schiller An die Freude (Ode to Joy; or Hymn to Joy) (1785)

One of the duties of old-age, is the management of time. The less that remains to us, the more valuable we ought to consider it. (p. 121).

Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert

Beyond the grave! As the vision rises how this side dwindles into nothing — a speck — a moment — and its glory and pomp shrink into the trinkets and baubles that amuse an infant for a day. Only those things, in the glory of this light, which lay hold of immortality, seem to have any value.

Randolph Sinks Foster Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride, which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife.

Nikola Tesla My Inventions (1919)

The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter — and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing

Omar Khayyám

This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel,
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.

J. R. R. Tolkien

He more we live, more brief appear
Our life's succeeding stages;
A day to childhood seems a year,
And years like passing ages.

Thomas Campbell

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