55 birthday quotes to help you celebrate in style (2024)

Birthdays are often the most eagerly anticipated occasion of the year, filled with laughter, excitement, and of course, birthday gifts. Beyond all the sprinkles, songs, presents and birthday quotes, birthdays are also a reminder to cherish the people who fill our lives with joy.

Whether you're blowing out the candles yourself or celebrating alongside friends and family, take a moment to think about all the amazing memories you've shared over the past year.

Birthday parties are the perfect time to show your loved ones how much you cherish them, whether you bake them a delicious birthday cake, dazzle them with candles and sparklers, or bring a tear to their eyes with a touching birthday card.

After all, birthday festivities are always appreciated, but a sweet birthday message is a thoughtful way to make your loved one's big day feel even more meaningful.

If you're searching for a sentiment that's a little less generic than your average convenience store card, a thoughtful birthday quote will add a special touch to your next celebration.

There's a birthday quote for every age, stage, and state of mind, whether you're full of festive fun or apprehensive about growing older. (After all, everyone has a birthday, from philosophers to pop stars.)

These inspirational, funny, and sentimental birthday quotes capture all the emotions that you might experience after another lap around the sun.

Inspirational birthday wishes

• “Let us never know what old age is. Let us know the happiness time brings, not count the years.” — Ausonius
• “The way I see it, you should live every day like it's your birthday.” — Paris Hilton
• “Every year on your birthday, you get a chance to start new.” — Sammy Hagar
• “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” ― Les Brown
• “A birthdate is a reminder to celebrate the life as well as to update the life.” ― Amit Kalantri, “Wealth of Words”

• “You don’t get older, you get better.” — Shirley Bassey
• “When you give someone your time, you are giving them a portion of your life that you’ll never get back. Your time is your life. That is whythe greatest gift you can give someone is your time.” — Rick Warren
• “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, “Through the Looking Glass”
• “Why party like it is 1999 when you can party like it is your birthday?” — Prince
• “The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.” — Oprah Winfrey

• “Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you’re exactly the same.” — Audrey Hepburn
• “Every day is a gift. But some days are packaged better.” ― Sanhita Baruah
• “It takes a long time to grow young.” — Pablo Picasso
• “Each 10 years of a man’s life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• “Youth has no age.” — Pablo Picasso
• “Mostly, what I have learned so far about aging, despite the creakiness of one’s bones and cragginess of one’s once-silken skin, is this: Do it. By all means, do it.” — Maya Angelou

Funny birthday quotes

• “All the world is birthday cake, so take a piece, but not too much.” — George Harrison
• “Eventually you reach a point when you stop lying about your age and start bragging about it.” — Will Rogers
• “The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.” — Lucille Ball
• “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
• “Life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research.” — Carl Jung

• “You know you’re getting old when the candles cost more than the cake.” — Bob Hope
• “Wisdom doesn’t necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.” —Tom Wilson
• “I know my wife won’t tell her right age. Last week was the anniversary of her birthday; she was twenty-six for the twelfth time. No wonder everybody says she holds her age well.” — Joe Laurie, Jr.
• “A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.” — Robert Frost
• “You’ve logged so many miles in the voyage of life that you’ve been upgraded to first class!” — Evelyn Loeb

• “Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.” — Douglas Coupland
• “But after all, what are birthdays? Here today and gone tomorrow.” — Eeyore, A. A. Milne
• “As I approach my 90th birthday, my friends are asking how it feels like, to have completed 90 orbits around the sun. Well, I actually don’t feel a day older than 89!” — Arthur C. Clarke
• “To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am.” — Bernard Baruch
• “It’s the nicest birthday I’ve ever had. You’ve made a happy man very old.” — Morrissey

• “I have a terrible time remembering exactly when my birthday is. Age is totally boring.” — Diana Vreeland
• “What a childhood I had. Once on my birthday my ol’ man gave me a bat. The first day I played with it, it flew away.” — Rodney Dangerfield
• “Lincoln was known to have walked miles to borrow books, to get the most rudimentary form of education. So what do we do on his birthday? We close the schools!” — Robert Orben

Thoughtful birthday quotes

• “We turn not older with years, but newer every day.”— Emily Dickinson
• “It was on my fifth birthday that Papa put his hand on my shoulder and said, Remember, my son, if you ever need a helping hand, you’ll find one at the end of your arm.” — Sam Levenson
• “Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.” — John Lennon
• “I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.” — Virginia Woolf
• “We grow neither better nor worse as we get old, but more like ourselves.” — Bernard Baruch

• “Youth is the gift of nature, but age is the work of art.” — Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
• “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
• “The day you’re born is not the day you grow, it’s the day you evolve. The revolution is up to you.” ― Goitsemang Mvula
• “The first fact about the celebration of a birthday is that it is a way of affirming defiantly, and even flamboyantly, that it is a good thing to be alive.” — G. K. Chesterton
• “I love to think that the day you’re born, you’re given the world as your birthday present.” — Leo Buscaglia

• “A person’s birthday should be a special day, a wonderful day, a day of pure celebration for the luck of being born!” — Elise Broach, “Shakespeare’s Secret”
• “Believing, hear, what you deserve to hear: / Your birthday as my own to me is dear / But yours gives most; for mine did only lend / Me to the world; yours gave to me a friend.” — Martial
• “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 had risen.” — Robert Wilson Lynd
• “You continue to learn more and more about yourself every day.” — Bruce Lee
• “If you’re blessed enough to grow older, which is how I look at aging, there’s so much wisdom to be gained from people who are celebrating the process with vibrancy and vigor and grace.” — Oprah Winfrey

• “We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge.” — James Hilman
• “Age is a limit we impose upon ourselves.” — Robert Riskin
• “My Birthday! what a different sound / That word had in my youthful ears.” — Thomas Moore
• “If life is a birthday cake let my face be smeared with its icing of cognac and kindness.” — Aberjhani
• “My birthday began with the water — birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name.” — Dylan Thomas
• From our birthday, until we die, / Is but the winking of an eye.” — William Butler Yeats