Forty Birthday Quotes & Sayings

But yet I'll make assurance double sure, and take a bond of fate: thou shalt not live. — William Shakespeare

The years passed unnoticed and unremembered, and one autumn morning I found myself suddenly forty-five years old. It was a time for weighing youthful hopes against mature accomplishment, for it was quite certain that I had by then done all I was ever going to do. Sitting alone at my desk that evening of my forty-fifth birthday I asked that least original of introspective questions: Where had it all gone? And the somewhat less banal question: What, after all, had it been? My — Trevanian

A man of forty today has nothing to worry him but falling hair, inability to button the top button, failing vision, shortness of breath, a tendency of the collar to shut off all breathing, trembling of the kidneys to whatever tune the orchestra is playing, and a general sense of giddiness when the matter of rent is brought up. Forty is Life's Golden Age. — Robert Benchley

Thirty, forty miles?" "Well," said Lila, verbally pouting. "I guess we'd better settle in for a long trip." She pushed her body even harder against Raj, then glared at the side of her father's head. Lila and Trevor got along with Meyer, but they were still teenagers. Piper, recently a teen herself, tried to understand, but often there was no use. Somewhere around your twenty-second birthday, teenagers started sounding like melodramatic idiots no matter what you did. "That's another reason to get a hotel room," Piper said. "They might let planes fly again. We can take the Gulfstream. — Sean Platt

Hate is a lack of imagination. — Graham Greene

Seek to engage yourself in passionate reading.
You will gain better understanding of life . — Lailah Gifty Akita

Death was a constant fact of life. The reaper struck with fire and drowning; typhus, malaria, yellow fever, and a host of other diseases; accidents that ranged from the swift shock of a horse's kick to a slow-spreading infection from a cut finger; and suicide and murder. More than one-fifth of the children born died before their first birthday; at birth the average life expectancy for an adult was little more than forty.6 Medicine at best could offer a patient little help and at worst was lethal, an excruciating matter of bleeding, blistering, and purging with potions such as laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol. — Barbara Weisberg

Wallace would have none of it. In reviewing The Descent of Man he wrote, 'Are we to believe that the actions of an ever varying fancy for a slight change of colour could produce and fix the definite colours and markings which actually characterise species?' Furthermore, he said, it was unacceptable to suggest that birds had an aesthetic sense. That would be crediting a bird with a human characteristic for which there was no evidence. It would be anthropomorphism at its most unjustified. — David Attenborough

Coup de foudre; perhaps it was real. One went from believing, when twenty, that it was the one kind of love that was real, to believing, once closer to forty, that it was not only fragile but false
the inferior, infantile, doomed love of twenty-year-olds. Somewhere between, the norms of one culture of love were discarded, and those of the other assumed. When did it happen, at midnight of one's thirty-first birthday? On the variable day that, while browsing a grocery-store aisle with a man, the repeating refrain of the rest of one's life for the first time resounds in one's ear? — Susan Choi

At fifteen, my mind was bent on learning.
At thirty, I stood firm.
At forty, I had no doubts.
At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven.
At sixty, my ear was receptive to truth.
At seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without sin. — Confucius

Whoever knows God, does not (any longer) say "God". — Idries Shah

The first thing I did when I was forty years old, I put handcuffs on and I jumped off Alcatraz prison and swam to San Francisco handcuffed. That made national publicity. Then, there were three or four years where I would do more difficult feats. Another birthday I towed a thousand pound boat across the Golden Gate. On my 65th Birthday I towed 65 boats a mile and a half in Tokyo. On my 70th Birthday I towed 70 boats with 70 people in it with my feet and hands tied a mile and a half in Long Beach ... My next Birthday I will be 93. I'm gonna tow my wife across the bathtub. — Jack LaLanne

People do whatever the hell they want to do at any age they fancy. Last month you were thirty-five. That means you're five years from forty. Do you think that the day you reach forty you will be any different than you were at thirty-nine or forty-one for that matter? People create little ideas about ages so they can write silly self-help books, stick stupid comments in birthday cards, create names for internet chat rooms and look for excuses for crisis that are happening in their life. — Cecelia Ahern

Thirty, thirty-five, forty, all had come to visit her like admonitory relatives, and all had slipped away without a trace, without a sound, and now, once again, she was waiting. — Evan S. Connell

This wine is forty years old. It certainly doesn't show its age. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

When I passed forty I dropped pretense, 'cause men like women who got some sense. — Maya Angelou

Do you think that the day you reach forty you will be any different than you were at thirty-nine or forty-one for that matter? People create little ideas about ages so they can write silly self-help books, stick stupid comments in birthday cards, create names for internet chat rooms and look for excuses for crises that are happening in their life. — Cecelia Ahern

Remember, that which appeals to the ego cannot help your spiritual growth. — Osho

The difference in their age had begun to matter, she had just turned forty and Jack was in his sixties, no longer the 'Brooding Heathcliff' that used to sign birthday cards to her. He wanted less and less to meet people, keeping her to himself, shutting the world out, drawing the heavy velvet curtains too early on a bright evening. If she announced that they might invite a few friends, he worried, began to wonder what time these friends might arrive and more importantly, what time they would leave. — Edna O'Brien

I invited a few people to help celebrate your birthday," Cameron said sheepishly. She threw up her hands. "Surprise."
"We sort of come with the package," Collin explained. "Think of it as a collective gift from all of us to you: five bona fide annoying and overly intrusive new best friends."
"It's the gift that keeps on giving," Wilkins said.
Jack grinned. "I'm touched. Really. And since it appears I'm going to be moving in, let me be the first to say that all of you are always welcome at my and Cameron's house. Subject to a minimum of forty-eight hours prior notification. — Julie James

Henry: I usen't to need anyone, just to myself, stories, there was a great one about an old fellow called Bolton, I never finished it, I never finished any of them, I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever. (Pause.) — Samuel Beckett

I read somewhere that a man should tell the story of his life at the age of forty, and this deadline is fast approaching as I write these lines, only a few short weeks remain before this ominous birthday arrives. — Juan Gabriel Vasquez

Today was my forty-fifth birthday. Impending old age and a problem marriage were staring me in the face. Not a good place to be. I figured that right now, I had two choices - crawl out of the pit, or wallow and die. To wallow or not to wallow? That was the question. Look at Scarlett O'Hara. Did she cry and whine when Rhett walked out the door not giving a damn? Well, okay, she did. But not for long, I'll bet. Not Scarlett. Same story here, baby, same story here. — Karen Cantwell

The second simultaneous thing Reacher was doing was playing around with a little mental arithmetic. He was multiplying big numbers in his head. He was thirty-seven years and eight months old, just about to the day. Thirty-seven multiplied by three hundred and sixty-five was thirteen thousand five hundred and five. Plus twelve days for twelve leap years was thirteen thousand five hundred and seventeen. Eight months counting from his birthday in October forward to this date in June was two hundred and forty-three days. Total of thirteen thousand seven hundred and sixty days since he was born. Thirteen thousand seven hundred and sixty days, thirteen thousand seven hundred and sixty nights. He was trying to place this particular night somewhere on that endless scale. In terms of how bad it was. Truth was, it wasn't the best night he had ever passed, but it was a long way from being the worst. A very long way. — Lee Child

I'm like a backward berry, Unripened on the vine, For all my friends are fifty, And I'm only forty-nine. — Ogden Nash

Once you know a thing you can't ever unknow it. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Or consider how we citizens of rich countries obtain our oil and minerals. Teodoro Obiang, the dictator of tiny Equatorial Guinea, sells most of his country's oil to American corporations, among them Exxon Mobil, Marathon, and Hess. Although his official salary is a modest $60,000, this ruler of a country of 550,000 people is richer than Queen Elizabeth II. He owns six private jets and a $35 million house in Malibu, as well as other houses in Maryland and Cape Town and a fleet of Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and Bentleys. Most of the people over whom he rules live in extreme poverty, with a life expectancy of forty-nine and an infant mortality of eighty-seven per one thousand (this means that more than one child in twelve dies before its first birthday). — Peter Singer

If blood be shed, let it be our own. Let us cultivate the calm courage to die without killing. — Mahatma Gandhi

The first forty years of our life give the text, the next thirty furnish the commentary upon it, which enables us rightly to understand the true meaning and connection of the text with its moral and its beauties. — Arthur Schopenhauer

When, sometime around my fortieth birthday, I was struck by the urge to try to write a novel, I was vastly comforted to learn that Rex Stout didn't write his first Nero Wolfe tale until he was forty-seven, and that he proceeded to write them right up to his death at the age of eighty-eight. It was considerably less comforting to learn that he typically completed a novel in thirty-eight days, and that he always got it right on the first try. P. G. Wodehouse once said, "Stout's supreme triumph was the creation of Archie Goodwin." That's how I've always felt about it, too. When I returned those first Rex Stout books to my librarian, I said to her, "Do you have any more of these Archie Goodwin stories?" She smiled, I recall, and said, "Why, yes. Dozens. — Rex Stout

No one ever stepped forward to protect me, Inspector. I wonder why I should feel any driving sense of duty to protect anyone else. Let me tell you something about love. It can be very cruel and very greedy. I've had done with it. And that has given me a freedom that I cherish. — Charles Todd

We don't understand life any better at forty than at twenty, but we know it and admit it — Jules Renard

Last night, I went to a birthday party, and this girl brought a cake and a cheesecake. And the other girls that lived in the apartment, I swear to God, all night long: 'You're taking that cake with you when you go. That cake's not staying in this house.' Like it's this evil, Hope Diamond, nuclear, horrifying cursed thing. — Janeane Garofalo