Time's fatal wings do ever forward fly;
To every day we live, a day we die.
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:
See Time has touched me gently in his race,
And left no odious furrows in my face.
To the true teacher, time's hour-glass should still run gold-dust.
In a progressive country change is constant;… change … is inevitable.
We feel and experience ourselves to be eternal. (Latin: "Sentimus experimurque nos æternos esse.")
For the things seen are temporary, but the things unseen are everlasting.
Through the sunset of hope,
Like the shapes of a dream,
What paradise islands of glory gleam!
There's no need to reminisce about the past; obviously because that shit did not last.