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:
Don’t shortchange the future, because of fear in the present.
Do nothing secretly; for Time sees and hears all things, and discloses all.
A permanent state of transition is man's most noble condition.
We may not have chosen the time, but the time has chosen us.
If you really want to love humanity, then you have to love humanity as it is now.
The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
Come what come may,
Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.
The more thorough the understanding needed, the further back in time one must go.
Love, hope, fear, faith — these make humanity;
These are its sign and note and character.
Nothing we do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future.
Life and hope for the world are to be found only in the deeds of love.