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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:

Whilst we deliberate how to begin a thing, it grows too late to begin it.

Quintilian

How slowly the hours pass to the unhappy.

Bernard-Joseph Saurin

Can any one find out in what condition his body will be, I do not say a year hence, but this evening?

Cicero

Change begets change. Nothing propagates so fast.

Charles Dickens

Man remains in the end what he started as in the beginning: a biosystem with a limited capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the consequence is future shock.

Alvin Toffler Future Shock (1970)

Cease to inquire what the future has in store, and to take as a gift whatever the day brings forth.

Horace

HOPE, n. Desire and expectation rolled into one.

Ambrose Bierce The Cynic's Dictionary (1906)

You need hope to get you going, but then by taking action, you generate more hope. It’s a circular thing.

Jane Goodall The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times (2021)

Don't throw away the hero in your soul. Hold your highest hopes holy.

Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885)

My hopes are not always realized, but I always hope.

Ovid

Vain hopes are like certain dreams of those who wake.

Quintilian

Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.

Charles Kingsley

I know now: I do not hope for anything. I do not fear anything, I have freed myself from both the mind and the heart, I have mounted much higher, I am free.

Nikos Kazantzakis The Saviors of God (1923)

Trust no future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, act in the living present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Voices of the Night (1839)

Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to past and future.

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now (1997)

A young man who had been troubling society with impalpable doctrines of a new civilization which he called "the Kingdom of Heaven" had been put out of the way; and I can imagine that believer in material power murmuring as he went homeward, "it will all blow over now." Yes. The wind from the Kingdom of Heaven has blown over the world, and shall blow for centuries yet.

George William Russell The Economics of Ireland and the Policy of the British Government (1921)

We are making the future as well as bonding to survive the enormous pressures of the present, and that is what it means to be a part of history.

Audre Lorde

There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody.

Adlai Stevenson II The Stevenson Wit (1965)

Eternity! thou pleasing dreadful thought!
Through what variety of untried being,
Through what new scenes and changes must we pass!

Joseph Addison Cato, A Tragedy (1713)

You don’t find time for important things, you make it.

Randy Pausch Time Management (2007)

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