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

With every new year comes yet another birthday, and while some of us enjoy the excitement of a large birthday bash, others prefer a more low-key celebration with only a few attendees.

Whether you love the attention that comes with birthdays, or you cringe when a group of waiters approach your table with a cake full of candles, there's a way to celebrate for everyone.

Around the world, birthdays can involve any number of fun traditions, including smashing a piñata full of sweet treats, or eating a bowl full of long noodles.

In America, we traditionally sing a special birthday song to mark the occasion. The “Happy Birthday” song, which was composed by Mildred and Patty Smith Hill in 1893, is one of the most well-known English language songs in the world.

From sweet birthday tributes full of well wishes to thoughtful handmade gifts, birthdays are an opportunity to show some extra appreciation to those around you.

However you choose to celebrate your own birthday or the birthday of a loved one, these inspirational, funny, and thoughtful birthday quotes will help you celebrate in style.

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

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
• "Age is a limit we impose upon ourselves." — Robert Riskin

• “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