Rising to the Occasion: The Best Toasts for Any Celebration

By Paul Dickson

The perfect pocket guide for anyone who ever needs to give a toast.

Paul Dickson's Rising to the Occasion is the ideal pocket reference for any moment when one might need to raise a glass. Organized by category, it contains sayings famous and profound, suitable and sentimental, created by the likes of Groucho Marx, Mark Twain, and Willard Scott alongside equally engaging anonymous toasts. Covering births, weddings, graduations, holidays, and many other events both major and minor, Paul Dickson also provides advice on how to give the best possible toast, and warnings about what one should never do.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Release date: May 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781620406656

Paul Dickson

Paul Dickson is the author of more than 60 nonfiction books. His previous works of discursive lexicography include The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, which the Wall Street Journal termed one of the “top five” top baseball books of all time, A Dictionary of the Space Age, which was written under a grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; Authorisms, words coined by writers; Words from the White House, and Family Words. The inspiration for G.I. Jive came from his recent World War II narrative The Rise of the G.I. Army 1940–1941, which the New York Times called “A profoundly heartening experience.” Dickson's writing has concentrated on 20th-century American history, baseball, biography, and popular culture. He lives in Kensington, Maryland.

Book preview

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Toasts

Age

A man is only as old as the woman he feels.

—Groucho Marx

Do not resist growing old—many are denied the privilege.

Fill high the goblet! Envious time steals, as we speak, our fleeting prime.

Here’s a health to the future;

A sigh for the past;

We can love and remember,

And hope to the last,

And for all the base lies

That the almanacs hold

While there’s love in the heart,

We can never grow old.

Here’s hoping that you live forever

And mine is the last voice you hear.

—Willard Scott, from A Gentleman’s Guide to Toasting

Here’s that we may live to eat the hen

That scratches on our grave.

I’ve never known a person to live to 110 or more, and then die, to be remarkable for anything else.

—Josh Billings

Let him live to be a hundred! We want him on earth.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes to a friend

Long life to you and may you die in your own bed.

May our lives, like the leaves of the maple, grow

More beautiful as they fade.

May we say our farewells, when it’s time to go,

All smiling and unafraid.

—Larry E. Johnson

May the Lord love us but not call us too soon.

May virtue and truth

Guide you in youth

Catnip and sage

Cheer your old age.

—Found in a geography book dated 1880, Cuttingsville, Vermont

May we keep a little of the fuel of youth to warm our body in old age.

May you enter heaven late.

May you live as long as you want, may you never want as long as you live.

May you live to be a hundred—and decide the rest for yourself.

Noah was six hundred years old before he knew how to build an ark—don’t lose your grip.

—Elbert Hubbard

Oh to be seventy again!

—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. on the occasion of his passing a pretty girl on the street at the age of about eighty-five

Only the young die good.

—Oliver Herford

The good die young—here’s hoping that you may live to a ripe old age.

To maturity:

When there’s snow on the roof,

there’s fire in the furnace.

To the Old Guard, the older we grow,

The more we take and the less we know.

At least the young men tell us so,

But the day will come, when they shall know

Exactly how far a glass can go,

To win the battle, ’gainst age, the foe.

Here’s youth . . . in a glass of wine.

—James Monroe McLean, The Book of Wine

To the old, long life and treasure;

To the young, all health and pleasure.

—Ben Jonson

You’re not as young as you used to be

But you’re not as old as you’re going to

Reviews for Rising to the Occasion

[Varsha Prakash · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I added this book to my collection with the hopes that it would give me some inspiration for my wedding speech; I was severely disappointed. Most of the quotes that they recommend sound so outdated and awkward to say in most of today's contexts. Definitely would not recommend.