You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.
New Year Quotes
Edmund Burke, in 1791, gave the most useful advice for the occasion: you can never plan the future by the past. The page is built from the pages on change, hope, the future and time, with Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Horace and Byron supplying most of the entries. It has no New Year collection behind it.
If you want something about resolutions, the Change page has better material. The famous line about a small group of citizens changing the world, credited to Margaret Mead, is marked disputed. Nobody has found where it comes from.
Most quoted on new year:
Hope of consciousness is strength
Hope of feelings is slavery
Hope of body is disease.
Saturninus said, "Comrades, you have lost a good captain to make him an ill general."
Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
I am the angel of reality,
Seen for a moment standing in the door.
Will change the pebbles of our puddly thought
To orient pearls.
Who well lives, long lives; for this age of ours
Should not be numbered by years, daies, and hours.
Time was the enemy never to be conquered and there were no reserves to help stay the tide.
Time, like a flurry of wild rain,
Shall drift across the darkened pane!
As the rolling stone gathers no moss, so the roving heart gathers no affections.
Now, there remain faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Time is the old justice that examines all such offenders, and let Time try.
He briskly and cheerfully asked him how a man should kill time.