With what knot shall I hold this Proteus, who so often changes his countenance?
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:
He despises what he sought; and he seeks that which he lately threw away.
He pulls down, he builds up, he changes squares into circles.
The lazy ox wishes for horse-trappings, and the steed wishes to plough.
Neither blows from pitchfork, nor from the lash, can make him change his ways.
Bodies are slow of growth, but are rapid in their dissolution.
With life many things are remedied.
(While there's life there's hope.)
We always hope, and in all things it is better to hope than to despair.
"A jolly place," said he, "in times of old!
But something ails it now: the spot is cursed."
The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.