I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965), on the eve of his 75th birthdayPersonally I think birthdays and anniversaries are like menstrual cramps, a regular pain in the ass that’s somehow connected to birth.
Hugh Elliott, Standing Room Only weblog, September 30, 2003
A friend never defends a husband who gets his wife an electric skillet for her birthday. Erma Bombeck (1927 - 1996)How many observe Christ’s birthday! How few, his precepts! O! ’tis easier to keep Holidays than Commandments.
Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790)
Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other never forgets them.
Ogden Nash (1902 - 1971)A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.
Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)
The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.
Oprah Winfrey
There is still no cure for the common birthday.
John Glenn
A man ninety years old was asked to what he attributed his longevity. I reckon, he said, with a twinkle in his eye, it’s because most nights I went to bed and slept when I should have sat up and worried.
Dorothea Kent
Age is a number and mine is unlisted.
Anonymous
With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.
William Shakespeare
Old age is always 15 years older than I am.
Bernard Baruch
Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternatives.
Maurice Chevalier
My mother groaned, my father wept,
into the dangerous world I leapt;
helpless, naked, piping loud,
like a fiend hid in a cloud.
William Blake
Men are like wine: some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age.
Pope John XXIII
If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
Abraham Sutzkever
On his seventy-second birthday in 1960, he [Chevalier] was asked what he felt about the advancing years. ‘Considering the alternative,’ he said, ‘it’s not too bad at all.’
Michael Freedland Maurice Chevalier (1981) ch. 20
Maurice ChavalierIt is fun to be in the same decade with you.
Cabled reply to Winston Churchill, acknowledging congratulations on his 60th birthday, in W. S. Churchill The Hinge of Fate (1950) ch. 4
Franklin D Roosevelt
For every year of life we light
A candle on your cake
To mark the simple sort of progress
Anyone can make,
And then, to test your nerve or give
A proper view of death,
You’re asked to blow each light, each year,
Out with your own breath.
In the Wilderness and Other Poems (1969) ‘A Birthday Poem’
James Simmons