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Birthday Quotes

Check out this long list of birthday quotes to help celebrate a special day.

There’s something for everyone – from the inspirational to the funny and everything in between.

A few of our favorites are as follows:

  • May you live all the days of your life.
    Jonathan Swift
  • It takes a long time to grow young.
    Pablo Picasso
  • Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.
    Fred Astaire

Enjoy and happy birthday celebration!

Birthday Quotes.

Best Birthday Quotes

1.) When I passed forty, I dropped pretense ‘cause men like women who got some sense.
Maya Angelou

2.) We grow too soon old and too late smart.
Dutch Proverb

3.) It’s sad to grow old but nice to ripen.
Brigitte Bardot

4.) He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount.
Chinese Proverb

5.) Blessed is the person who is too busy to worry in the daytime and too sleepy to worry at night.
Unknown

6.) I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.
John Burroughs

Fred Astaire quote on birthdays.

Funny Birthday Quotes

7.) There are days of oldness, and then one gets young again.
Katherine Butler Hathaway

8.) At middle age, the soul should be opening up like a rose, not closing up like a cabbage.
John Andrew Holmes

9.) Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you are aboard, there is nothing you can do about it.
Golda Meir

10.) The spiritual eyesight improves as the physical eyesight declines.
Plato

You might like HBD Belated Wishes Ideas.

11.) Getting older is a piece of cake (and a few more candles).
Unknown

12.) Confidence is that feeling you have before you understand the situation.
Unknown

13.) Lead me not into temptation; I can find it myself.
Unknown

14.) Men grow old, pearls grow yellow, and there is no cure for it.
Chinese Proverb

15.) Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit, and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these.
Susan B. Anthony

Try Happy 40th Birthday Wishes and Messages.

Birthday Quotes image.

Short Birthday Quotations

16.) It is never too late to be what you might have been.
George Eliot

17.) May you live all the days of your life.
Jonathan Swift

18.) Don’t just count your years; make your years count.
Ernest Meyers

19.) Time has a wonderful way of weeding out the trivial.
Christopher Morley

20.) The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.
Seneca

21.) Be grateful for luck. Pay the thunder no mind – listen to the birds. And don’t hate nobody.
Eubie Blake

You might like our Happy Birthday Paragraph page.

22.) At seventy-seven, it is time to be earnest.
Samuel Johnson

23.) At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.
Orson Welles

24.) Please don’t retouch my wrinkles. It took me so long to earn them.
Anna Magnani

25.) Old age is not for sissies.
Malcolm Forbes

26.) Our birthdays are feathers in the broad wing of time.
Jean-Paul Richter

Check out: Birthday Wishes for Father

Awesome Birthday Quotations

27.) Let us celebrate the occasion with wine and sweet words.
Plautus

28.) You’re not getting older; you’re just getting better.
Unknown

29.) From our birthday until we die, is but the winking of an eye.
William Butler Yeats

30.) May you live all the days of your life.
Jonathan Swift

31.) If we could be twice young and twice old, we could correct all our mistakes.
Euripides

32.) Life is a hereditary disease.
Unknown

33.) Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.
Unknown

34.) A lady of a “certain age,” which means “certainly aged.”
Lord Byron

Include a clean joke on your birthday card or message.

Happy birthday quotes to celebrate.

Quotes for a Very Special Person

35.) Cherish all your happy moments: they make a fine cushion for old age.
Harold Azine

36.) Most people die at 25 and aren’t buried until they’re 75.
Benjamin Franklin (for more of the Best Benjamin Franklin Quotes)

37.) Every ten years of a man’s life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.
Goethe

38.) Happiness may well consist primarily of an attitude toward time.
Robert Grudin

39.) For the happiest life, days should be rigorously planned, nights left open to chance.
Mignon McLaughlin

40.) Happiness in the older years of life, like happiness in every year of life, is a matter of choice — your choice for yourself.
Richard Ben Sapir

Messages for your niece’s birthday.

Birthday Quotations for Best Friend

41.) We turn older with years but newer every day.
Emily Dickinson

42.) Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys, and unexpected sorrows.
Betty Friedan

43.) You’ve logged so many miles in the voyage of life that you’ve been upgraded to first-class!
Evelyn Loeb

44.) Live long and prosper.
Mr. Spock

45.) Every day is a birthday; every moment of it is new to us; we are born again, renewed for fresh work and endeavor.
Isaac Watts

46.) Until you make peace with who you are, you’ll never be content with what you have.
Doris Mortman

47.) Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
George Bernard Shaw

48.) We grow neither better nor worse as we get old but more like ourselves.
May Lamberton Becker

49.) You don’t stop laughing because you grow old; you grow old because you stop laughing.
Michael Pritchard

50.) Take care of the minutes, and the hours will take care of themselves.
Lord Chesterfield

51.) The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them but that they seize us.
Ashley Montagu

More: 100 Best Birthday Captions: Funny and Clever

For Husband

52.) Even at our birth, death does but stand aside a little. And every day, he looks towards us and muses somewhat to himself whether that day or the next he will draw nigh.
Robert Bolt

53.) Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds.
Buddha

54.) Birth and death are the two noblest expressions of bravery.
Kahlil Gibran

55.) All the world is birthday cake, so take a piece, but not too much.
George Harrison

56.) Death borders upon our birth, and our cradle stands in the grave. Our birth is nothing but our death begun.
Bishop Hall

Check out Happy Birthday Message ideas

Let them eat cake.

Birthday Love Quotes

57.) People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.
Anton Chekhov

58.) An old man loved his winter with flowers.
Proverb

59.) Sixteen candles make a lovely light, but not as bright as your eyes tonight.
Luther Dixon

60.) I love everything that’s old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines.
Oliver Goldsmith

61.) The advantage of being eighty years old is that one has many people to love.
Jean Renoir

62.) God loveth a cheerful giver.
Corinthians

63.) It is lovely when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me.
Ellen Glasgow

64.) Age does not protect you from loving. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
Anais Nin

65.) When I was 24, 44 seemed like 104! But my strengths now come from experience. I feel like I’ve come into my own.
Sally Field

66.) Rule for Happiness: Something to do, Someone to love, Something to hope for.
Immanuel Kant

67.) Happiness is perfume; you can’t pour it on somebody else without getting a few drops on yourself.
James Van Der Zee

68.) Those whom the gods love grow young.
Oscar Wilde

Birthday Quotes for Your Special Day

69.) The greatest comfort of my old age, and that which gives me the highest satisfaction, is the pleasing remembrance of the many benefits and friendly offices I have done to others.
Marcus Cato

70.) Nobility is not a birthright. It is defined by one’s actions.
Robin Hood

71.) You were born an original. Don’t die a copy.
John Mason

72.) Real birthdays are not annual affairs. Real birthdays are the days when we have a new birth.
Ralph Parlette

73.) Old age: A great sense of calm and freedom. When the passions have relaxed their hold, you may have escaped, not from one master but from many.
Plato

74.) We are born weak; we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man’s estate, is the gift of education.
Jean Jacques Rousseau

75.) Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.
Voltaire

76.) Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.
William Wordsworth

77.) Thirty-five is when you finally get your head together, and your body starts falling apart.
Caryn Leschen

Birthday Messages

78.) If you want to be happy, be.
Henry David Thoreau

79.) A true friend remembers your birthday but not your age.
Unknown

80.) Why not think about times to come and not about the things that you’ve done.
Fleetwood Mac song

81.) The older the fiddler, the sweeter the tune.
English Proverb

82.) Age is strictly a case of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.
Mark Twain

83.) There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little, for when one is grown, one would know them as a matter of course.
Rainer Maria Rilke

84.) Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.
Fred Astaire

85.) Whatever with the past has gone, The best is always yet to come.
Lucy Larcom

86.) It takes a long time to grow young.
Pablo Picasso

87.) It is better to wear out than to rust out.
Bishop Richard Cumberland

88.) A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.
Robert Frost

89.) My Birthday! what a difference sound
That word had in my youthful ears;
And how each time the day comes round,
Less and less white its mark appears.
Thomas Moore

Best Happy Birthday Quotes

90.) Here’s a posy of flowers, and a basket too, with Birthday greetings all for you.
Unknown

91.) Sugar in the gourd and honey in the horn, I never was so happy since the hour I was born.
Unknown

92.) Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn’t original sin. He’s born with the tragedy that he has to grow up — a lot of people don’t have the courage to do it.
Helen Hayes

93.) When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.
James M. Barrie

94.) Most of us can remember a time when a birthday – especially if it was one’s own brightened the world as if a second sun has risen.
Robert Lynd

95.) Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
Franz Kafka

96.) At times, it seems that I am living my life backward and that at the approach of old age, my real youth will begin. My soul was born covered with wrinkles-wrinkles that my ancestors and parents most assiduously put there and that I had the greatest trouble removing,
Andre Gide

97.) I want to be an artist to paint pictures just for you, so when each birthday comes around, I can send you quite a few.
Unknown

98.) The secret to eternal youth is arrested development.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth

99.) It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.
Margaret Mead

Famous Birthday Sayings

100.) There was a star danced, and under that was I born.
William Shakespeare

101.) There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
George Santayana

102.) Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.
Margaret Fuller

103.) Sing a song of Birthdays
Full of fun and cheer
And may you keep on having them
For many a happy year.
Unknown

104.) Few women admit their age. Few men act theirs.
Unknown

105.) One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.
Virginia Woolf

106.) Youth comes but once in a lifetime.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

107.) Youth had been a habit of hers for so long that she could not part with it.
Rudyard Kipling

108.) Keep true to the dream of thy youth.
Friedrich Von Schiller

109.) It is through the idealism of youth that man catches sight of truth, and in that idealism, he possesses a wealth which he must never exchange for anything else.
Albert Schweitzer

For Co-Workers

110.) A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbors: he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost, and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him before he can come near their camp.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

111.) Everything I know I learned after I was thirty.
Georges Clemenceau

112.) The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.
T.S. Eliot

113.) When you turn thirty, a whole new thing happens: you see yourself acting like your parents.
Blair Sabol

114.) How unspeakably, the lengthening of memories in common endears our old friends!
George Eliot

115.) To me, fair friend, you never can be old, For as you were when first your eye I eyed, Such seems your beauty still.
William Shakespeare

116.) Time draweth wrinkles in a fair face but addeth fresh colors to a fast friend.
John Lyle

117.) When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished a how much he had learned in seven years.
Mark Twain

More Birthday Quotes for Colleagues

118.) Nature gives you the face you have at twenty, but it’s up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.
Coco Chanel

119.) How far that little candle throws his beams!
William Shakespeare

120.) The secret anniversaries of the heart.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

121.) The manner of giving is worth more than the gift.
Pierre Corneille

122.) Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected and unplanned by me.
Carl Sandburg

123.) You grow up the day you have your first real laugh yourself.
Ethel Barrymore

124.) Make hay while the sun shines.
Unknown

Happy Birthday Mom

125.) One today is worth two tomorrows.
Benjamin Franklin

126.) The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Alphonse Karr

127.) Every ten years, a man should give himself a good kick in the pants.
Edward Steichen

128.) We are always the same age inside.
Gertrude Stein

129.) The heyday of a woman’s life is the shady side of fifty.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton

130.) Thirty, thirty-five, forty, all had come to visit her like admonitory relatives, and all had slipped away without a trace, without a sound, and now, once again, she was waiting.
Evan S. Connell

131.) I am long on ideas but short on time. I expect to live to be only about a hundred.
Thomas Alva Edison

132.) Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.
French proverb

133.) At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgement.
Benjamin Franklin

134.) A man of forty today has nothing to worry him but falling hair, inability to button the top button, failing vision, shortness of breath, a tendency of the collar to shut off all breathing, trembling of the kidneys to whatever tune the orchestra is playing, and a general sense of giddiness when the matter of rent is brought up. Forty is Life’s Golden Age.
Robert Benchley

135.) You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four. A man is or may be young to after sixty and not old before eighty.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

136.) No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us – something more than we could learn by ourselves from a book.
Cyril Connolly

Birthday Quotes For A Wonderful Birthday

137.) You take all the experience and judgment of men over fifty out of the world, and there wouldn’t be enough left to run it.
Henry Ford

138.) Friendship is the shadow of the evening, which strengthens with the setting sun of life.
Jean De La Fontaine

139.) A friendship counting nearly forty years is the finest kind of shade tree I know.
James Russell Lowell

For Family Member

140.) Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be.
Robert Browning

141.) Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
Ingrid Bergman

142.) Birth may be a matter of a moment, but it is a unique one.
Frederick Leboyer

143.) Youth is the gift of nature, but age is the work of art.
Garson Kanin

144.) Whatever with the past has gone, the best is always yet to come.
Lucy Larcom

145.) What could be more beautiful than a dear old lady growing wise with age? Every age can be enchanting, provided you live within it.
Brigitte Bardot

146.) Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age.
George Sand

147.) The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.
Gail Sheehy

148.) What I wouldn’t give to be seventy again!
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

149.) Live as long as you may; the first twenty years are the longest half of your life.
Robert Southey

150.) In a dream, you are never eighty.
Anne Sexton

151.) Age is not measured by years. Nature does not equally distribute energy. Some people are born old and tired, while others are going strong at seventy.
Dorothy Thompson

152.) There must be a day or two in a man’s life when he is the precise age for something important.
Franklin P. Adams

153.) A man is old when he can pass an apple orchard and not remember the stomachache.
James Russell Lowell

Birthday Greetings to Sister

154.) In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
Albert Camus

155.) My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends-
It gives a lovely light!
Edna St. Vincent Millay

156.) Once, I was looking through the kitchen window at dusk, and I saw an old woman looking in. Suddenly the light changed, and I realized that the old woman was myself. you see, it all happens on the outside; inside, one doesn’t change.
Molly Keane

157.) Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
Mark Twain

158.) I’m like a fine wine. They don’t bring me out very much, but I am well-preserved.
Rose Kennedy

Happy Birthday Insights

159.) The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
Henry L Mencken

160.) Of middle age the best that can be said is that a middle-aged person has likely learned how to have a little fun in spite of his troubles.
Don Marquis

161.) At 19, everything is possible, and tomorrow looks friendly.
Jim Bishop

162.) Birthdays are good for you. Statistics show that the people who have the most live the longest.
Reverend Larry Lorenzoni

163.) There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
George Santayana

164.) For all the advances in medicine, there is still no cure for the common birthday.
John Glenn

165.) Money is appropriate, and one size fits all.
William Randolph Hearst

166.) Youth has no age.
Pablo Picasso

167.) Each ten years of a man’s life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.
Goethe

168.) To see a young couple loving each other is no wonder, but to see an old couple loving each other is the best sight of all.
William Makepeace Thackeray

169.) There are days of oldness, and then one gets young again.
Katherine Butler Hathaway

170.) One should never trust a woman who tells her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell anything.
Oscar Wilde

171.) Youth is the best time to be rich, and the best time to be poor.
Unknown

Aging Quotes

172.) Age is a high price to pay for maturity.
Tom Stoppard

173.) All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific.
Jane Wagner

174.) Women deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of twenty-eight and forty.
James Thurber

175.) Please don’t retouch my wrinkles. It took me so long to earn them.
Anna Magnani

176.) It just is crazy that I’m 53. I think I’m very immature. I feel like a kid.
Ellen DeGeneres

177.) When the candles on your cake burn down before they are all lit, you know you are getting up there.
Catherine Pulsifer

178.) Middle age is when you still believe you’ll feel better in the morning.
Bob Hope

Birthday Quotes for Good Friends

179.) Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.
John Lennon

180.) Every birthday and every celebration ends with something sweet, a cake, and people remember. It’s all about the memories.
Buddy Valastro

181.) From good friends and true, from old friends and new, may good luck go with you and happiness, too!
Unknown

182.) The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.
Oscar Wilde

183.) Put candles in a cake, it’s a birthday cake. Put candles in a pie, and somebody’s drunk in the kitchen.
Jim Gaffigan

Birthday Quotes With Advice

184.) With mirth and laughter, let old wrinkles come.
William Shakespeare

185.) Age is just a state of mind, and you are as old as you think you are. You have to count your blessings and be happy.
Abhishek Bachchan

186.) A birth date is a reminder to celebrate life as well as to update life.
Amit Kalantri

187.) There are two great days in a person’s life—the day we are born, and the day we discover why.
William Barclay

188.) Our birthdays are feathers in the broad wing of time.
Jean-Paul

189.) Let us never know what old age is. Let us know the happiness time brings, not count the years.
Ausonius

190.) The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.
Lucille Ball

Famous Birthday Quotes

191.) Age is whatever you think it is. You are as old as you think you are.
Muhammad Ali

192.) Every birthday is a gift. Every day is a gift.
Aretha Franklin

193.) The purpose of our lives is to be happy.
Dalai Lama

194.) Do your dance, it’s your birthday.
Usher

196.) Keep smiling because life is a beautiful thing, and there’s so much to smile about.
Marilyn Monroe

197.) The years teach much which the days never knew.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

198.) I realized it was only me who was stopping myself from living my life.
Jennifer Aniston

199.) Our birthdays are feathers in the broad wing of time.
Jean-Paul Richter

200.) Let them eat cake.
Marie Antoinette

By Michael O’Halloran

Michael is the editor and founder of Greeting Card Poet.

Extra Extra

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Thank you for Wishes

Funny Bday Messages

21st Birthday Quotations

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