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:
Man yields to death; and man's sublimest works
Must yield at length to Time.
He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.
And one by one in turn, some grand mistake
Casts off its bright skin yearly like the snake.
Change is inevitable in a progressive country,
Change is constant.
All things must change
To something new, to something strange.
And can eternity belong to me,
Poor pensioner on the bounties of an hour?
How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states unborn and accents yet unknown.
I live in hope and that I think do all
Who come into this world.
Daughter of Faith, awake, arise, illume
The dread unknown, the chaos of the tomb.
While there is life there's hope (he cried,)
Then why such haste?—so groan'd and died.