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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 present is our own; but while we speak,
We cease from its possession, and resign
The stage we tread on, to another race,
As vain, and gay, and mortal as ourselves.

Thomas Love Peacock

Expect, but fear not, Death: Death cannot kill,
Till Time (that first must seal his patent) will.
Would'st thou live long? keep Time in high esteem:
Whom gone, if thou canst not recall, redeem.

Francis Quarles

For no one, in our long decline,
So dusty, spiteful and divided,
Had quite such pleasant friends as mine,
Or loved them half as much as I did.

Hilaire Belloc

The wicked have only accomplices, the voluptuous have only companions in debauchery; self-seekers have only associates; politicians have only their factions; the generality of idle men has only connections; princes have only courtiers; virtuous men alone possess friends.

Voltaire

In friendship I early was taught to believe;
* * * * * *
I have found that a friend may profess, yet deceive.

Lord Byron

The new is older than the old;
And newest friend is oldest friend in this:
That, waiting him, we longest grieved to miss
One thing we sought.

Helen Hunt Jackson

Oh happiness! our being's end and aim!
Good, Pleasure, Ease, Content! whate'er thy name;
That something still which prompts th' eternal sigh,
For which we bear to live, or dare to die.

Alexander Pope

A pure mind is the source of happiness.

Amit Ray

Oh, Mirth and Innocence! Oh, Milk and Water!
Ye happy mixtures of more happy days!

Lord Byron Beppo (1818)

At Earth's great market where Joy is trafficked in,
Buy while thy purse yet swells with golden Youth.

Alan Seeger

[A]t the crossroads of our history, we need to turn our backs on the past.

F. W. de Klerk

Does a young man, rejected by his first love, declare that love does not exist? The young man says to himself: “I’ll find someone better able to understand what I feel. And then I will be happy for the rest of my days."

Paulo Coelho Manuscript Found in Accra (2012)

In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation — it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I in the primer of minor poetry.

G. K. Chesterton The Defendant (1901)

seeming's enough for slaves of space and time
—ours is the now and here of freedom. Come

E. E. Cummings

A blossom full of promise is life's joy,
That never comes to fruit; hope, for a time,
Suns the young floweret in its gladsome light,
And it looks flourishing—a little while,
Tis past, we know not whither, but 'tis gone—

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

I still think of myself as I was 25 years ago. Then I look in a mirror and see an old bastard and realise it's me.

Dave Allen

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.

Bob Dylan The Times They Are A-Changin (1964)

Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you.

T. S. Eliot

Time that devours all things.

Ovid

Where you are liberal of your loves and counsels
Be sure you be not loose; for those you make friends
And give your hearts to, when they once perceive
The least rub in your fortunes, fall away
Like water from ye, never found again
But where they mean to sink ye.

William Shakespeare Henry VIII (1613)

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