birthday quotes for best friends

Defining myself, as opposed to being defined by others, is one of the most difficult challenges I face. ~Carol Moseley-Braun



Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable. ~W.H. Auden



The chief characteristics of the liberal attitude are human sympathy, a receptivity to change, and a scientific willingness to follow reason rather than faith. ~Chester Bowles, New Republic, 22 July 1946



Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. ~Henry David Thoreau



A door opens to me. I go in and am faced with a hundred closed doors. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin



What the world really needs is more love and less paper work. ~Pearl Bailey



New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions. ~Mark Twain



Once you accept the fact that you're not perfect, then you develop some confidence. ~Rosalynn Carter



A dog, I have always said, is prose; a cat is a poem. ~Jean Burden



The attention span of a computer is only as long as its power cord. ~Author Unknown



It would be impossible to "love" anyone or anything one knew completely. Love is directed towards what lies hidden in its object. ~Paul Valery, Tel quel, 1943



To control your hormones is to control your life. ~Barry Sears



Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness. ~Seneca



In June, as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them. ~Aldo Leopold



Never let the little head do the thinking for the big head. ~Author unknown, advice to teenage boys, quoted in Friendly Advice compiled by Jon Winokur



The stern hand of fate has scourged us to an elevation where we can see the great everlasting things that matter for a nation; the great peaks of honour we had forgotten - duty and patriotism, clad in glittering white; the great pinnacle of sacrifice pointing like a rugged finger to heaven. ~David Lloyd George



Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act. ~Truman Capote



The first cup moistens my lips and throat. The second cup breaks my loneliness. The third cup searches my barren entrail but to find therein some thousand volumes of odd ideographs. The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration - all the wrongs of life pass out through my pores. At the fifth cup I am purified. The sixth cup calls me to the realms of the immortals. The seventh cup - ah, but I could take no more! I only feel the breath of the cool wind that raises in my sleeves. Where is Elysium? Let me ride on this sweet breeze and waft away thither. ~Lu Tung, "Tea-Drinking"



Truth is rarely writ in ink; it lives in nature. ~Martin H. Fischer



Don't anthropomorphize computers - they hate it. ~Author Unknown