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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:

What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.

W. Somerset Maugham Points of View (1959)

It is the common vice of all, in old age, to be too intent upon our interests.

Terence

Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.

Gertrude Stein

The revolutionary can have no friendship or attachment, except for those who have proved by their actions that they, like him, are dedicated to revolution.

Sergey Nechayev Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869)

How much of our literature, our political life, our friendships and love affairs, depend on being able to talk peacefully in a bar!

John Wain As given in Simpson's Contemporary Quotations (1988)

What nobler relationship than that of friend? What nobler compliment can man bestow than friendship?

Manly P. Hall The Lost Keys Of Freemasonry (1923)

With tennis, they say it's a social sport you can play from six to 60 - they should say 90, your friendships go on forever.

Don Tregonning

Venerable sir, this is the entire holy life (brahmacariya), that is, good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship.

Śāriputra

"Avoid mixing business with friendship. I learnt that the hard way."

Tosin Ajibade

A foundation of friendship is the basis for any relationship.

Ade Laoye

Female friendships are built on knowing about the minutiae, and just like news, they require your presence.

Gaby Hinsliff

To better integrate into people's lives, you need to learn their mother tongue, communicate, understand each other, establish bonds of friendship and communion.

Vincent Nguyễn Văn Bản

Women must fight during their youth to value themselves and become empowered in order to avoid becoming beggars in their old age.

Catherine Nzuzi wa Mbombo

A relationship is about companionship and friendship.

Miriam Quiambao

Distance sometimes endears friendship, and absence sweeteneth it.

James Howell

Study is the bane of childhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of adulthood, and a restorative in old age.

Walter Savage Landor

Love is like the wild rose-briar;
Friendship like the holly-tree.
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms,
But which will bloom most constantly?

Emily Brontë

Dad on friendship: "Sure, some people are nice. Real nice. Nice like carpets so you can walk all over them."

David Sedaris Theft by Finding: Diaries, Volume 1 (1977-2002) (2017)

This is the Comfort of Friends, that though they may be said to Die, yet their Friendship and Society are, in the best Sense, ever present, because Immortal.

William Penn Fruits of Solitude (1682)

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family — but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.

Willa Cather Shadows on the Rock (1931)

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