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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:

You shouldn't chase after the past or place expectations on the future. What is past is left behind.

Gautama Buddha

Any concepts or words which have been formed in the past through the interplay between the world and ourselves are not really sharply defined with respect to their meaning: that is to say, we do not know exactly how far they will help us in finding our way in the world.

Werner Heisenberg Physics and Philosophy (1958)

My merry, merry, merry roundelay
Concludes with Cupid’s curse:
They that do change old love for new,
Pray gods, they change for worse!

George Peele

In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child's.

George Eliot Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861)

It takes 11 guys to change the world. It takes five to change a university. We can do this.

Robert P. George With Bill Kristol (2016)

As high as we have mounted in delight,
In our dejection do we sink as low.

William Wordsworth Resolution and Independence (1807)

My visions of the future are always pretty much standard issue. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer... and there are flying cars.

Joss Whedon

It is to hope, though hope were lost.

Anna Laetitia Barbauld

Now he had form and substance.
He had become a personality, something they had filtered out of the system many decades ago.

Harlan Ellison

Great change begins with small steps taken at home.

Amy Goodman Standing Up To the Madness: Ordinary Heroes In Extraordinary Times with David Goodman (2008)

The purpose of time is to enable you to learn how to use time constructively. It is thus a teaching device and a means to an end. Time will cease when it is no longer useful in facilitating learning.

Helen Schucman A Course in Miracles (1976)

The principle of nowness is very important to any effort to establish an enlightened society.

Pema Chödrön How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind (2008)

The year goes wrong, and tares grow strong,
Hope starves without a crumb;
But God's time is our harvest time,
And that is sure to come.

Lewis J. Bates

Still ending, and beginning still.

William Cowper The Task (1785)

In an infinite, eternal universe, the point is that anything is possible, and it's unlikely that we can even begin to scratch the surface of the full range of possibilities.

Stanley Kubrick Playboy Interview (1968)

Things fall apart, and time breaks your heart

Billie Eilish

Let us transfix this momentary eternity which encloses everything, past and future, but without losing in the immobility of language any of its gigantic erotic whirling.

Nikos Kazantzakis The Saviors of God (1923)

Under capitalism time-keeping is not merely a means of co-ordinating and inter-relating complicated functions: it is also like money an independent commodity with a value of its own.

Lewis Mumford Technics and Civilization (1934)

Come, sir, is time really so precious? Mine isn't. If yours is, all the more tempting to steal a little.

Rex Stout portrays Nero Wolfe in A Right to Die (1964)

Nought treads so silent as the foot of Time;
Hence we mistake our autumn for our prime.

Edward Young

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