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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:

Hope is what enables us to keep going in the face of adversity. It is what we desire to happen, but we must be prepared to work hard to make it so.

Jane Goodall The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times (2021)

When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to "hope" at all. We simply do the work.

Derrick Jensen

Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair. I remember the killers, I remember the victims, even as I struggle to invent a thousand and one reasons to hope.

Elie Wiesel

I have searched, I have indistinctly seen, I have doubted. Now, I hope.

Henri Barbusse Light (1919)

All of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth, and all the truth, and to do so promptly — right now.

Buckminster Fuller Critical Path (1981)

To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes — or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face
Lighting a little Hour or two — is gone.

Omar Khayyám FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859)

Inflamed with the study of learning and the admiration of virtue; stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots, dear to God, and famous to all ages.

John Milton Tractate of Education (1644)

The created World is but a small Parenthesis in Eternity.

Thomas Browne Christian Morals (1716)

Life moved ever outward into infinite possibilities and yet all things were perfect and finished in every single moment, their end attained.

David Zindell Neverness (1988)

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

Robert F. Kennedy

Good to the heels the well-worn slipper feels
When the tired player shuffles off the buskin;
A page of Hood may do a fellow good
After a scolding from Carlyle or Ruskin.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

You fail to understand, my friend. We do not control time. If anything, it controls us. We simply measure it.

Michael Moorcock The Time Dweller (1969)

Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.

Mignon McLaughlin The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981)

There is a road that turning always
Cuts off the country of Again.
Archers stand there on every side
And as it runs time's deer is slain
And lies where it has lain.

Edwin Muir

His golden locks time hath to silver turned;
O time too swift! O swiftness never ceasing!
His youth ’gainst time and age hath ever spurned,
But spurned in vain; youth waneth by encreasing.

George Peele Polyhymnia (1590)

Hours are golden links, God's token
Reaching heaven; but one by one
Take them, lest the chain be broken
Ere the pilgrimage be done.

Adelaide Anne Procter Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won't make us happier.

Randy Pausch The Last Lecture (2008)

Let the sweet hope that Thou art mine,
My life and death attend;
Thy presence through my journey shine,
And crown my journey's end.

Anne Steele

We forget that people can change, including our own people; including ourselves.

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

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