Quotations for Toasts and Speeches

(Excerpted from MitzvahChic, A New Approach to Hosting a Bar or Bat Mitzvah That is Meaningful, Hip, Relevant, Fun & Drop-Dead Gorgeous, available at www.mitzvahchic.com.)

Often the hardest part of writing a speech for your child’s bar/bat mitzvah is getting started. If you’re hung up, don’t keep trying to think of that all-important first line yourself when there’s so much great material out there. Use a quote! This selection contains quotations on life, children, and friendship.

Life and How Best to Live It

• The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart. -Helen Keller
• The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart. -Helen Keller
• Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life. – Elie Wiesel
• We make a living by what we get; we make a life by what we give. – Winston Churchill
• There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. – Albert Einstein
• Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Live each day as if your life had just begun. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. – George Bernard Shaw
• Do just once what others say you can’t do, and you will never pay attention to their limitations again. – James R. Cook
• Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome. – Samuel Johnson

Children and Adolescents

• The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults. – Peter De Vries
• The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults. – Peter De Vries
• Adolescence is a period of rapid changes. Between the ages of 12 and 17, for example, a parent ages as much as 20 years. – Anonymous
• You don’t have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. – John Ciardi

Quotations on Friendship

• Love is blind, but friendship closes its eyes. – Unknown
• Love is blind, but friendship closes its eyes. – Unknown
• What is a friend? I will tell you it is someone with whom you dare to be yourself. – Frank Crane
• A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and sings it back to you when you have forgotten how it goes. – Unknown
• A friend is one who believes in you when you have ceased to believe in yourself – Unknown