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:
A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.
Now, if the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would amount to the same.
The four eights, that ideal of operative felicity, are here (New Zealand) a realized fact.
While we are speaking envious time will have fled. Seize the present day.
As hope and fear alternate chase
Our course through life's uncertain race.