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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.

Random quote on New Year

Most quoted on new year:

One thing alone not even God can do,
To make undone whatever hath been done.

Aristotle

Now that I've met you,
Would you object to
Never seeing each other again?

Aimee Mann

Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past — let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

John F. Kennedy

It’s not until they tell you you’re going to die soon that you realize how short life is. Time is the most valuable thing in life because it never comes back. And whether you spend it in the arms of a loved one or alone in a prison-cell, life is what you make of it. Dream big.

Stefán Karl Stefánsson

The past is to be respected and acknowledged, but not to be worshipped. It is our future in which we will find our greatness.

Pierre Trudeau

Shrine of the mighty! can it be
That this is all remains of thee?

Lord Byron The Giaour (1813)

O Time! consumer of all things; O envious age! thou dost destroy all things and devour all things with the relentless teeth of years, little by little in a slow death.

Leonardo da Vinci The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883)

Nought may endure but Mutability.

Percy Bysshe Shelley Mutability (1816)

I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.

Carl Sandburg Incidentals (1904)

We only have to look around us to see how complexity and psychic temperature are still rising: and rising no longer on the scale of the individual but now on that of the planet.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin The Heart of Matter (1950)

It must be obvious... that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.

Alan Watts The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951)

History says don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

Seamus Heaney

The Pythagoreans called the monad "intellect" because they thought that intellect was akin to the One; for among the virtues, they likened the monad to moral wisdom; for what is correct is one.

Iamblichus

True change is evolutionary, not revolutionary. It is futile for political systems to force human beings to cooperate or construct social bonding structures. People already do that, naturally; it is evident in our evolutionary history.

L. K. Samuels In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)

Time had passed. It will, given half the chance.

Esther Friesner A Pig's Tale (1995)

That awful independent on to-morrow!
Whose work is done; who triumphs in the past;
Whose yesterdays look backward with a smile
Nor, like the Parthian, wound him as they fly.

Edward Young

Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I'll tell you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal.

William Shakespeare

But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day and the race a life.

Benjamin Disraeli Sybil (1845)

My inheritance, how wide and fair
Time is my estate; to Time I'm heir.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Each passing year robs us of some possession.

Horace

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