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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:

Let my hand,
This hand, lie in your own—my own true friend;
Aprile! Hand-in-hand with you, Aprile!

Robert Browning

The only reality is now, today. What are you waiting for to be happy?...Happiness is not exuberant or noisy, like pleasure or joy; it’s silent, tranquil, and gentle; it’s a feeling of satisfaction inside that begins with self-love.

Isabel Allende The Japanese Lover (2015)

And yet it is a wasted heart :
It is a wasted mind
That seeks not in the inner world
Its happiness to find ;
For happiness is like the bird
That broods above its nest,
And finds beneath its folded wings,
Life's dearest, and its best.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Ye seek for happiness—alas, the day!
Ye find it not in luxury nor in gold,
Nor in the fame, nor in the envied sway
For which, O willing slaves to Custom old,
Severe taskmistress! ye your hearts have sold.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Joy! Joy! I did not know that all this world is so much part of me, that we are all one army, that windflowers and stars struggle to right and left of me and do not know me; but I turn to them and hail them.

Nikos Kazantzakis The Saviors of God (1923)

Underlying this succession of moments which constitutes the superficial existence of beings and things, and which is continually modifying and transforming them, one can search for a truer, more essential character, which the artist will seize so that he may give to reality a more lasting interpretation.

Henri Matisse Notes of a Painter (1908)

The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea... It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end.

Wallace Stevens Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

The land of the living was not far removed from the domain of the ancestors. There was coming and going between them, especially at festivals and also when an old man died, because an old man was very close to the ancestors. A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.

Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958)

O Death! O Change! O Time!
Without you, O! the insufferable eyes
Of these poor Might-Have-Beens,
These fatuous, ineffectual yesterdays.

William Ernest Henley

don't drain the cup of joy in a single sip.

Rosario Castellanos

Gone! gone forever!—like a rushing wave
Another year has burst upon the shore
Of earthly being—and its last low tones,
Wandering in broken accents in the air,
Are dying to an echo.

George D. Prentice

Oh, frabjous day! Callooh. Callay!
He chortled in his joy.

Lewis Carroll

Of course many people will have much to say.
We should listen. But we won't be deceived
by words such as Indispensable, Unique, and Great.
Someone else indispensable and unique and great
can always be found at a moment's notice.

Constantine P. Cavafy Collected Poems (1992)

Joy! Joy! I triumph! Now no more I know
Myself as simply me. I burn with love
Unto myself, and bury me in love.
The centre is within me and its wonder
Lies as a circle everywhere about me.
Joy! Joy! No mortal thought can fathom me.

Attar of Nishapur

How fading are the joys we dote upon!
Like apparitions seen and gone.
But those which soonest take their flight
Are the most exquisite and strong,—
Like angels’ visits, short and bright;
Mortality ’s too weak to bear them long.

John Norris

I made a posy while the day ran by;
Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie
My life within this band.
But time did beckon to the flowers, and they
By noon most cunningly did steal away,
* And wither'd in my hand.

George Herbert

I am any man's suitor,
If any will be my tutor:
Some say this life is pleasant,
Some think it speedeth fast,
In time there is no present,
In eternity no future,
In eternity no past. We laugh, we cry, we are born, we die.
Who will riddle me the how and the why?

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

... time is the friend of the wonderful business — it's the enemy of the lousy business.

Warren Buffett

Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch its flowing. Yet the timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness, And knows that yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream.

Kahlil Gibran The Prophet (1923)

A word of the faith that never balks,
Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely.
It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all,
That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all.

Walt Whitman

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