The first law of the universe is everything changes, all the time.
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:
Our greatest good, and what we least can spare,
Is hope: the last of all our evils, fear.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre —
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Races, better than we, have leaned on her wavering promise,
Having naught else but Hope.
What reinforcement we may gain from hope;
If not, what resolution from despair.
And tho't that the light-house look't lovely as hope,
That star on life's tremulous ocean.
The miserable have no other medicine
But only hope:
I've hope to live, and am prepar'd to die.
True hope is swift, and flies with swallow's wings:
Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.
Hope is a lover's staff; walk hence with that
And manage it against despairing thoughts.
To hope till hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.