The hope of impunity is the greatest inducement to do wrong.
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:
The setting of a great hope is like the setting of the sun. The brightness of our life is gone.
Let no one despair, even though in the darkest night the last star of hope may disappear.
In the great inconstancy and crowd of events, nothing is certain except the past.
I would like to offer one short poem you can recite from time to time, while breathing and smiling
Do not think
I’ve reached where I am now
by slipping like a landslide
or evaporating like a cloud.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
Endure the hardships of your present state,
Live, and reserve yourselves for better fate.