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:
Six hours in sleep, in law's grave study six,
Four spend in prayer, the rest on Nature fix.
We shall forget by day, except
The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.
All that we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
Swift speedy Time, feathered with flying hours,
Dissolves the beauty of the fairest brow.
And write whatever Time shall bring to pass
With pens of adamant on plates of brass.
Time, eftsoon will tumble
All of us together like leaves in a gust,
Humbled indeed down into the dust.
Time is lord of thee:
Thy wealth, thy glory, and thy name are his.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow.
Therefore fear not to assay
To gather, ye that may,
The flower that this day
Is fresher than the next.
Hereditary
Rather than purchased; what he cannot change,
Than what he chooses.