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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:

There comes with old age a time when the heart is no longer fusible or malleable, and must retain the form in which it has cooled down.

Sheridan Le Fanu Uncle Silas (1864)

Whoever escapes marriage
And women's harm, comes to deadly old age
Without any son to support him.

Stanley Lombardo Works and Days and Theogony (1993)

I can only say that friendship should rise above man-made laws, which tend to be capricious by their very nature.

Tendai Huchu The Hairdresser of Harare (2010)

Friendship, if you know how to work it, is better than a cousin in Parliament.

Marcus Clarke

Since then, consumers from the old age group are also buying beauty products, but the initial success was from millennials

Falguni Nayar

Gold begets in brethren hate;
Gold in families debate;
Gold does friendship separate;
Gold does civil wars create.

Abraham Cowley

It is not for minds like ours to give or to receive flattery; yet the praises of sincerity have ever been permitted to the voice of friendship.

Lord Byron

Friendship in the Greek tradition, in the Roman tradition, in the old tradition, was always viewed as the highest point which virtue can reach.

Ivan Illich We the People interview (1996)

Personally we look forward to an old age of dissipation and indolence and unreverend disrepute.

Don Marquis The Almost Perfect State (1921)

The Tories and their friends are laughing all the way to the bank at the disunity in Scotland. We must extend the hand of friendship to the SNP.

George Galloway

Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.

Lawrence Durrell

I want friendship, co-operation and trade (with the EU). I don't want to be part of a political union.

Nigel Farage

We do not need your guilt feelings. We need your friendship.

Yousif Thomas Mirkis

You cannot push me into something I do not want to do. I will glow with this skin till old age and do not forget, black does not crack.

Jumoke George

I cannot but bring to your mind those days when the whole of Eastern Asia, from Burma to Japan was united with India in the closest ties of friendship...

Rabindranath Tagore

Old age is the harbor of all ills.

Diogenes Laërtius The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (200)

Friendship is Love without wings.

Lord Byron

The mind of a wise man is the safest custody of secrets; cheerfulness is the key to friendship; patience and forbearance will conceal many defects.

Ali

Cato requested old men not to add the disgrace of wickedness to old age, which was accompanied with many other evils.

Plutarch

"The friendship of two young people," says Goethe somewhere, "is delightful when the girl likes to learn and the boy to teach."

André Maurois Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939)

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