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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 tragedy of human history is decreasing happiness in the midst of increasing comforts.

Chinmayananda Saraswati

True art is to create a magnificent city and fill the hearts of its people with happiness.

Mehmed II

In our time the science of Sufism is desolate.

Ali Hujwiri The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004)

Happiness is the harvest of a quiet eye.

Austin O'Malley Keystones of Thought (1914)

You should be glad that the government has provided for chain and bangles at their own expense, why are you feeling so bad about it?

Kalki Krishnamurthy

Knowledge, surely, is always of time, whereas knowing is not of time. Knowledge is from a source, from accumulation, from conclusion, while knowing is a movement.

Bruce Lee Striking Thoughts (2000)

The best time to write a story is yesterday. The next best time is today.

R. A. Lafferty It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs (1995)

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift.

Albert Einstein Essay to Leo Baeck (1953)

Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else.

Malcolm X Malcolm X Speaks (1965)

To say, therefore, that thought cannot happen in an instant, but requires a time, is but another way of saying that every thought must be interpreted in another, or that all thought is in signs.

Charles Sanders Peirce Collected Papers (1931)

Who is there, my friend, can climb to the sky?
Only the gods dwell forever in sunlight.
As for man, his days are numbered,
whatever he may do, it is but wind.

Gilgamesh

I was too busy doing my job and living my life to spend time keeping notes for some future volume of memoirs.

Pierre Trudeau Memoirs (1993)

There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.

Isaac Asimov The Gods Themselves (1972)

To live among friends is the primary essential of happiness.

William Thomson

A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend.

Eric Hoffer Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)

Friends share music with each other, they don't allow themselves to be divided by a system that says that nobody is supposed to have copies.

Richard Stallman LibrePlanet Keynote Speech (2015)

The perfect joys of heaven do not satisfy the cravings of nature.

William Hazlitt The Round Table (1815)

The joy of love is too short, and the sorrow thereof, and what cometh thereof, dureth over long.

Thomas Malory Le Morte d'Arthur (c. 1469) (1485)

These are called the pious frauds of friendship.

Henry Fielding Amelia (1751)

We moved toward that precipice with a motion as inexorable as that with which time takes us toward our death.

Samuel R. Delany Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

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