quotes on birthday

Dawn seemed to follow midnight with indecent haste. ~J.K. Rowling, "Magic is Might," Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 2007



I never saw a man who looked with such a wistful eye upon that little tent of blue which prisoners call the sky. ~Oscar Wilde



Marriage is a ghastly public confession of a strictly private intention. ~Ian Hay



Boy, n.: a noise with dirt on it. ~Not Your Average Dictionary



A man may be born a jackass; but it is his business if he makes himself a double one. ~Martin H. Fischer



I learned a long time ago that minor surgery is when they do the operation on someone else, not you. ~Bill Walton



It is an ironic fact that while half the world's population is dying as a result of diseases of poverty (largely starvation and infection) the other half is succumbing to diseases of affluence. ~Malcolm Carruthers



Don't offer a neurotic happiness - he'll never take it. There's a bout of misery keeping him perfectly content. ~Terri Guillemets



If the sole reason why you must not kill your neighbour is because God has forbidden it and will severely punish you for it in this or the next life - then, when you learn that there is no God and that you need not fear His punishment, you will certainly kill your neighbour without hesitation, and you can only be prevented from doing so by mundane force. Thus either these dangerous masses must be held down most severely and kept most carefully away from any chance of intellectual awakening, or else the relationship between civilization and religion must undergo a fundamental revision. ~Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion



Diplomat: A person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip. ~Caskie Stinett, Out of the Red, 1960



It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult. ~Seneca



In Rome you long for the country; in the country - oh inconstant! - you praise the distant city to the stars. ~Horace, Satires In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. ~Carl Sagan, 1987



It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission. ~Grace Hopper



The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good old days. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physical demythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, roofless wandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right to walk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror. The walk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage of the feudal promenade in the nineteenth century. ~Theodor W. Adorno



Calamity, n. A more than commonly plain and unmistakable reminder that the affairs of this life are not of our own ordering. ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary



Of all sound of all bells... most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year. ~Charles Lamb



I am convinced digestion is the great secret of life. ~Sydney Smith



Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not. ~James Joyce



Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it. ~Author Unknown



With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves. ~Eric Hoffer