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:
I see that time divided is never long, and that regularity abridges all things.
All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart.
The possible future is not just longer than the past. It is unimaginably longer.
Eternity is a child playing, playing checkers; the kingdom belongs to a child.
Believe me, wise men don't say ‘I shall live to do that’, tomorrow's life is too late; live today.
It may be that in the future you will be helped by remembering the past.
Neither will the wave which has passed be called back; nor can the hour which has gone by return.
A vase is begun; why, as the wheel goes round, does it turn out a pitcher?