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:
Time destroys the groundless conceits of men; it confirms decisions founded on reality.
Such fire was not by water to be drown'd,
Nor he his nature changed by changing ground.
In so great a danger the faintest hope should be considered.
Hope, deceitful as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of life along an agreeable road.
We can never enter upon the path to virtue unless we have hope as our guide and companion.