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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:

Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall;
A mother's secret hope outlives them all.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

One only hope my heart can cheer,—
The hope to meet again.

George Linley

But hope will make thee young, for Hope and Youth
Are children of one mother, even Love.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.

Thomas Carlyle

"Dead are all gods: now we want the overman to live" — on that great noon, let this be our last will.

Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1891)

Impermanence becomes vivid in the present moment; so do compassion and wonder and courage. And so does fear.

Pema Chödrön When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (1997)

What counts now is not just what we are against, but what we are for. Who leads us is less important than what leads us — what convictions, what courage, what faith — win or lose. A man doesn't save a century, or a civilization, but a militant party wedded to a principle can.

Adlai Stevenson II

But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.

John Maynard Keynes A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923)

Just because we cannot see clearly the end of the road, that is no reason for not setting out on the essential journey. On the contrary, great change dominates the world, and unless we move with change we will become its victims.

Robert F. Kennedy

Given time-time not in years but in millennia-life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time.

Rachel Carson Silent Spring (1962)

Even after all that, each and every being here believe,
that the heat will be defeated and coolness will prevail.
The experience knows
that the rule of an autocrat cannot last long.

Suman Pokhrel

Oh, if life were made of moments,
Even now and then a bad one!
But if life were only moments,
Then you'd never know you had one.

Stephen Sondheim Into The Woods (1986)

The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.

William Gibson All Tomorrow's Parties (2003)

Time is eternity;
Pregnant with all eternity can give;
Pregnant with all that makes archangels smile.
Who murders Time, he crushes in the birth
A power ethereal, only not adorn'd.

Edward Young

Long is the calm brain active in creation;
Time only strengthens the fine fermentation.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

FUTURE, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.

Ambrose Bierce The Cynic's Word Book (1906)

The moment your attention turns to the Now, you feel a presence, a stillness, a peace. You no longer depend on the future for fulfillment and satisfaction - you don’t look to it for salvation.

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now (1997)

The hunter follows things which flee from him; he leaves them when they are taken; and ever seeks for that which is beyond what he has found.

Ovid

I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern. My hopes, indeed, sometimes fail; but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.

Thomas Jefferson

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past.

Walter Benjamin Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

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