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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:

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.

Walt Whitman

All forces have been steadily employ'd to complete and delight me,
Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.

Walt Whitman

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

William Shakespeare The Tempest (1611)

In many indigenous ways of knowing, time is not a river, but a lake in which the past, the present, and the future exist. Creation, then, is an ongoing process and the story is not history alone—it is also prophecy.

Robin Wall Kimmerer Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Alas! it is not till time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life to light the fires of passion with from day to day, that man begins to see that the leaves which remain are few in number.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Hyperion (1839)

The bell strikes one. We take no note of time
But from its loss.

Edward Young Night-Thoughts (1742)

Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we don't know if it even exists...

Clifford D. Simak Shakespeare's Planet (1976)

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

Anatole France The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881)

As the blessings of health and fortune have a beginning, so they must also find an end. Everything rises but to fall, and increases but to decay.

Sallust The Cyclopaedia of Practical Quotations: English and Latin (1894)

I had seen the great, but I had not seen the small.

Vittorio Alfieri

Time stands with impartial law.

Marcus Manilius

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

T. S. Eliot

Minutes, hours, days, months, and years,
Pass'd over to the end they were created,
Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave.
Ah, what a life were this!

William Shakespeare

What does not destructive time destroy?

Horace

The flood of time is rolling on;
We stand upon its brink, whilst they are gone
To glide in peace down death's mysterious stream.
Have ye done well?

Percy Bysshe Shelley

All things change, nothing perishes.

Ovid

Change played in its new fashion with the world for twenty years. To most men the new things came little by little and day by day, remarkably enough, but not so abruptly as to overwhelm.

H. G. Wells The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904)

The future is not what is coming at us, but what we are headed for.

Jean-Marie Guyau

We two [Deucalion and Pyrrha, after the deluge] form a multitude.

Ovid

Hopes have precarious life.
They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off
In vigorous growth and turned to rottenness.

George Eliot The Spanish Gypsy (1868)

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