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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:

They all lived as ants in the shadow of mountains of millennia, and time’s sheer mass shaded every word.

Gregory Benford Beyond Infinity (2004)

The happiness of most people we know is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.

Ernest Dimnet What we live by (1932)

There comes some time an end to all things, to the good and to the bad.

Alec Waugh The Loom of Youth (1917)

All explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest.

Arthur C. Clarke The City and the Stars (1956)

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

Friedrich Schlegel

At a single glance I survey the whole Universe.
He will never be happy, whom such pleasures fail to please!

Tao Yuanming

During the last three centuries, there has been, by virtue of the Inquisition, a greater enjoyment of peace, and happiness, in Spain, than in the other nations of Europe.

Joseph de Maistre Letters on the Spanish Inquisition (1822)

The sense of existence is the greatest happiness.

Benjamin Disraeli Contarini Fleming (1832)

Human Felicity is produc'd not so much by great Pieces of good Fortune that seldom happen, as by little Advantages that occur every Day.

Benjamin Franklin The Autobiography (1818)

Happiness is doing it rotten your own way.

Isaac Asimov I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994)

Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.

Elbert Hubbard The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (1927)

"I wish life was not so short," he thought. "Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about."

J. R. R. Tolkien

Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.

Virginia Woolf A Moment's Liberty (1990)

One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be "happy" is not included in the plan of "Creation."

Sigmund Freud Civilization and Its Discontents (1929)

“Happiness,” Jubal stated, “lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing.”

Robert A. Heinlein To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987)

Hairbreadth missings of happiness look like the insults of Fortune.

Henry Fielding The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749)

Given enough time humans will screw up Wikipedia just as they have screwed up everything else, but so far it's not too bad.

Jimmy Wales

It is wrong to assume that men of immense wealth are always happy.

John D. Rockefeller

Time stretches like a lazy leopard when it wants to.

Stephen Baxter Vacuum Diagrams (1997)

It is vain futility to analyze the algebra of time.

Dejan Stojanovic The Creator (2000)

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