101 Famous Birthday Quotes

Birthdays were made for celebrating, but phrases like “happy birthday,” “best wishes,” and “birthday greetings” are as fresh and exciting as week-old birthday cake. The next time you want to celebrate someone on their birthday, why not send them a handwritten card (or personalized ecard!) with an inspiring, humorous, or uplifting quote from a famous writer, actor, musician, or visionary?

We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of noteworthy quotes on the subject of birthdays, life, and the passage of time that will suit every person on your list — young and old alike.

For a lift

1. “Go, shorty, it’s your birthday.” — 50 Cent
2. “To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent — that is to triumph over old age.” — Thomas Bailey Aldrich
3. “Age is whatever you think it is. You are as old as you think you are.” — Muhammad Ali
4. “Birthdays are inevitable, beautiful and very particular moments in our lives! Moments that bring precious memories back, celebrate the present times and give hope for the future.” — Babe Arish
5. “Let us never know what old age is. Let us know the happiness time brings, not count the years.” — Decimus Magnus Ausonius
6. “They say it’s your birthday / It’s my birthday too, yeah / They say it’s your birthday / We’re gonna have a good time / I’m glad it’s your birthday /Happy birthday to you” — The Beatles, “Birthday”
7. “You don’t get older, you get better.” — Shirley Bassey
8. “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.” — Robert Browning
9. “We turn not older with years, but newer every day.” — Emily Dickinson
10. “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” — George Eliot
11. “Every birthday is a gift. Every day is a gift.” — Aretha Franklin
12. “Today is the oldest you have been and the youngest you will ever be again. Make the most of it!” — Nicky Gumbel
13. “Every year on your birthday you get to start anew.” — Sammy Hagar
14. “In other words, live vicariously, beautifully, and excitedly, discover, love, dare, and act as there is nothing to lose.” — Andy Hertz
15. “The way I see it, you should live everyday like it’s your birthday.” — Paris Hilton

16. “Whatever with the past has gone, the best is always yet to come.” — Lucy Larcom
17. “The purpose of our lives is to be happy.” — Dalai Lama
18. “Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you!” — Dr. Seuss
19. “My life is better with every year of living it.” — Rachel Maddow
20. “Please don’t retouch my wrinkles. It took me so long to earn them.” — Anna Magnani
21. “Love the life you live. Live the life you love.” — Bob Marley
22. “Don’t just count your years, make your years count.” — George Meredith
23. “Keep smiling, because life is a beautiful thing and there’s so much to smile about.” — Marilyn Monroe
24. “A birthday is not a day to fear. It is a day to celebrate and look forward to the coming year.” — Byron Pulsifer
25. “Birthdays come but once a year, celebrate and be of good cheer.” — Robert Rivers
26. “Because time itself is like a spiral, something special happens on your birthday each year: The same energy that God invested in you at birth is present once again.”— Menachem Mendel Schneerson
27. “With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.” — William Shakespeare
28. “Your birthday is the beginning of your own personal new year. Your first birthday was a beginning, and each new birthday is a chance to begin again, to start over, to take a new grip on life.” — Wilfred Peterson
29. “Do your dance, it’s your birthday.” — Usher
30. “Love the giver more than the gift.” — Brigham Young

For a laugh

31. “Let them eat cake.” — Marie Antoinette
32. “The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.” — Lucille Ball
33. “I like birthday cake. It’s so symbolic. It’s a tempting symbol to load with something more complicated than just ‘Happy birthday!’ because it’s this emblem of childhood and a happy day.” — Aimee Bender
34. “A friend never defends a husband who gets his wife an electric skillet for her birthday.” — Erma Bombeck
35. “Nice to be here? At my age, it’s nice to be anywhere.” — George Burns
36. “At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.” — Benjamin Franklin
37. “A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.” — Robert Frost
38. “Put candles in a cake, it’s a birthday cake. Put candles in a pie, and somebody’s drunk in the kitchen.” — Jim Gaffigan
39. “All the world is birthday cake, so take a piece, but not too much.” — George Harrison
40. “Age is not important unless you are a cheese.” — Helen Hayes

41. “Old age is fifteen years older than I am.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes
42. “Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle.” — Bob Hope
43. “When it comes to birthdays, I think there are two camps. There are people like me, who choose to treat it like any other day, and then there are the ‘birthday people.’ You know, those people who claim the full month in which they were born as their own. — Dan Levy
44. “Birthdays are good for you. Statistics show that the people who have the most live the longest.” — Larry Lorenzoni
45. “The reason I met my husband was because I remembered a friend’s birthday. The moral of the story is: Remember people’s birthdays.” — Julianna Margulies
46. “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” — Groucho Marx
47. “The first hundred years are the hardest.” — Wilson Mizner
48. “When the candles on your cake burn down before they are all lit, you know you are getting up there.” — Catherine Pulsifer
49. “Middle age is when you still believe you’ll feel better in the morning. — Bob Hope
50. “Eventually you reach a point when you stop lying about your age and start bragging about it.” — Will Rogers

51. “You know you’re getting old when you get that one candle on the cake. It’s like, ‘See if you can blow this out.'” — Jerry Seinfeld
52. “Just remember, once you’re over the hill you begin to pick up speed.” — Charles Schulz
53. “Let us respect gray hairs, especially our own.” — J. P. Sears
54. “The good thing about getting older is if you don’t want to do something you can say, I’m too old to do that!” — Kate Summers
55. “You know you’re getting old when the candles cost more than the cake.” — Bob Hope
56. “Birthdays are a great time to stop and appreciate gravity. Sure, it makes things sag as you get older, but it also keeps your cake from flying all over the room, so you don’t have to chase it.” — Greg Tamblyn
57. “The older you get the better you get, unless you are a banana.” — Betty White
58. “The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.” — Oscar Wilde
59. “As you get older, three things happen: The first is your memory goes, and I can’t remember the other two.” — Norman Wisdom

For inspiration

60. “Live not one’s life as though one had a thousand years, but live each day as the last.” — Marcus Aurelius
61. “There are two great days in a person’s life — the day we are born and the day we discover why.” — William Barclay
62. “The years teach much which the days never knew.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
63. “You were born and with you endless possibilities, very few ever to be realized. It’s okay. Life was never about what you could do, but what you would do.” — Richelle E. Goodrich
64. “Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the romance of the unusual.” — Ernest Hemingway
65. “Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes
66. “Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.” — D. H. Lawrence
67. “The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.” — Madeleine L’Engle
68. “And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” — Abraham Lincoln
69. “Today you have added another candle of knowledge and wisdom to your life. May it give you the power to enlighten the whole world.” — Debasish Mridha

70. “It takes a long time to become young.” — Pablo Picasso
71. “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
72. “Our birthdays are feathers in the broad wings of time.” — Jean Paul Richter
73. “To know how to grow old is the masterwork of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.” — Tom Stoppard
74. “No wise man ever wished to be younger.” — Jonathan Swift
75. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So, throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover!” ­— Mark Twain
76. “God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.” — Voltaire
77. “Wisdom doesn’t necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.” — Tom Wilson
78. “From our birthday, until we die, / Is but the winking of an eye.” — William Butler Yeats

For perspective

79. “I realized it was only me who was stopping myself from living my life.” — Jennifer Aniston
80. “Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.” — Fred Astaire
81. “A birthday is just another day where you go to work, and people give you love. 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
82. “We grow neither better nor worse as we get old, but more like ourselves.” — Bernard Baruch
83. “There are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents, and only one for birthday presents, you know.” — Lewis Carroll
84. “Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.” — Maurice Chevalier
85. “Don’t regret another birthday, the good news is that you are alive and can celebrate it.” — Catherine Pulsifer

86. “If we could be twice young and twice old, we could correct all our mistakes.” — Euripides
87. “A child whose birthday is coming up is so excited, they count down the days. But as we get older, we seem to lose the excitement. We need to rethink and be happy we have reached another birthday.” — Theodore W. Higginsworth
88. “Each ten years of a man’s life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.” — Goethe
89. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the result of other people’s thinking.” — Steve Jobs

90. “Life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research.” — Carl Jung
91. “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” — Helen Keller
92. “Most of us can remember a time when a birthday — especially one’s own — brightened the world as if a second sun has risen.” — Robert Staughton Lynd
93. “The best birthdays of all are those that haven’t arrived yet.” — Robert Orben
94. “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?” — Satchel Paige
95. “Youth has no age.” — Pablo Picasso
96. “A birthday is a time to reflect on the year gone by, but to also set your goals for the upcoming year.” — Catherine Pulsifer
97. “Each day is a new beginning. I know that the only way to live my life is to try to do what is right, to take the long view, to give of my best in all that the day brings, and to put my trust in God.” — Queen Elizabeth II
98. “May you live all the days of your life.” — Jonathan Swift
99. “Life is ten percent what happens to me and ninety percent how I react to it.” — Charles Swindoll
100. “Cherish all your happy moments; they make a fine cushion for old age.” — Booth Tarkington
101. “The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.” — Oprah Winfrey