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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 time for war has not yet come, but it will come and that soon; and when it does come my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.

Stonewall Jackson

Each time dawn appears, the mystery is there in its entirety.

René Daumal

You need friends to keep you on your feet, and enemies to keep you on your toes.

Gregory Benford Beyond Infinity (2004)

It seems that I have spent my entire time trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.

A. J. Ayer

Get it wrong, and we call it a cult. Get it right, in the right time and the right place, and maybe, for the next few millennia, people won't have to go to work on your birthday.

Robert Sapolsky

Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.

Maxine Hong Kingston

For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.

Marshall McLuhan The Mechanical Bride (1951)

Fire is the reuniting of matter with oxygen. If one bears that in mind, every blaze may be seen as a reunion, an occasion of chemical joy.

Tom Robbins Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976)

I never meet anyone nowadays who admits to having had a happy childhood. Everyone appears to think happiness betokens a lack of sensitivity.

Jessamyn West

As life runs on, the road grows strange
With faces new, and near the end
The milestones into headstones change,
'Neath every one a friend.

James Russell Lowell Heartsease and Rue (1888)

Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased; thus do we refute entropy.

Spider Robinson

Friendship craves
The commerce of the mind, not the exchange
Of emulous feasts that foster sycophants.

Alfred Austin Savonarola (1881)

I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

Kurt Vonnegut

I can't think that it would be terrible of me to say — and it is occasionally true — that I need physics more than friends.

Robert Oppenheimer

I can feel a something pounding in my brain
Just any time that someone speaks your name
Trumpets sound and I hear thunder boom
Every time that you walk in the room.

Jackie DeShannon When You Walk In The Room (1962)

Priestley was the first (unless it was Beccaria) who taught my lips to pronounce this sacred truth — that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.

Jeremy Bentham

Levin wanted friendship and got friendliness; he wanted steak and they offered spam.

Bernard Malamud

Let us also once more rejoice in, and thank God for, the fact that we know nothing about Homer, and practically nothing about Shakespeare.

George Saintsbury

O Farid ! Friend is not hidden; everywhere He is openly manifest. Darkness is all pervaise Light. Only it has been named differently.

Khwaja Ghulam Farid The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004)

I wish to fall ill that all my time may pass in seclusion with the Lord and be saved appearing in mass prayers.

Al-Fudayl ibn 'Iyad The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004)

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