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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:

Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

There are so few who can grow old with a good grace.

Richard Steele The Spectator (1711)

They who are pleased themselves must always please.

James Thomson The Castle of Indolence (1748)

Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings.

Rollo May Man’s Search for Himself (1953)

Yes'm, old friends is always best, 'less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of.

Sarah Orne Jewett The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)

I am every day more convinced that happiness in Heaven is for those who know how to be happy on earth.

Josemaría Escrivá The Forge (1987)

The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.

Thích Nhất Hạnh Touching Peace (1992)

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Henri Bergson Creative Evolution (1907)

No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent.

Charles Stross Rule 34 (2011)

An aged Christian, with the snow of time on his head, may remind us that those points of earth are whitest that are nearest heaven.

Edwin Hubbell Chapin Living Words (1860)

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.

Thomas Jefferson

That is almost the definition of any friendship that is worthwhile — that we don't care a damn how you behave yourself.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley Trent's Own Case (1936)

A man is as old as he's feeling, a woman is as old as she looks.

Mortimer Collins

Old age comes on apace to ravage all the clime.

James Beattie The Minstrel; or, The Progress of Genius (1771)

There's a hope for every woe,
And a balm for every pain,
But the first joys of our heart
Come never back again!

Robert Gilfillan

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?

John Leonard Private Lives in the Imperial City (1979)

There is a pleasure which is born of pain.

Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton The Wanderer (1859)

Women, like princes, find few real friends.

George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton Poetical Works (1801)

If I could only give three words of advice, they would be, "tell the truth." If I got three more words, I'd add: "All the time."

Randy Pausch The Last Lecture (2008)

I should say that happiness is being where one is and not wanting to be anywhere else.

Michael Frayn Summerchild in A Landing on the Sun (1991)

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