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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:

That vast, beneficent Eternity
Where all things lovely pass to when they die.

Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff

'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore,
And coming events cast their shadows before.

Thomas Campbell

Our dearest hopes in pangs are born,
The kingliest Kings are crown'd with thorn.

Gerald Massey

Hope dead lives nevermore,
No, not in heaven.

Christina Rossetti

It is never right to consider that a man has been made happy by fate, until his life is absolutely finished, and he has ended his existence.

Sophocles

Hope of all passions, most befriends us here

Edward Young

The past Hours weak and gray
With the spoil which their toil
Raked together
From the conquest but One could foil.

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound (1820)

Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.

William Wordsworth

Just as in the great moment of resignation one does not mediate but chooses, now the task is to gain proficiency in repeating the impassioned choice and, existing, to express it in existence.

Søren Kierkegaard Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (1846)

Now Mercy says, speaking from her silence, stand in the sun. Breath the deep. Feel what can be!

J. M. DeMatteis Mercy (1993)

Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.

Walt Whitman

Two things make the future real, the artist's imagination and the worker's hope. Fascism destroys both. Therefore the artist and the worker must unite to destroy Fascism. The Fascist artist is a traitor, the neutral is already dead. Art and anti-Fascism are synonymous.

John Langdon-Davies

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times. All of war is that way.

Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

Fly, envious Time, till thou run out thy race:
Call on the lazy leaden-stepping Hours,
Whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace;
And glut thyself with what thy womb devours,
Which is no more than what is false and vain,
And merely mortal dross.

John Milton

Hope! thou nurse of young desire.

Isaac Bickerstaffe Love in a Village (1762)

The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present.

Leonardo da Vinci The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883)

You talk of the scythe of Time, and the tooth of Time: I tell you, Time is scytheless and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the worm — we who smite like the scythe. It is ourselves who abolish — ourselves who consume: we are the mildew, and the flame.

John Ruskin A Joy for Ever (1857)

Schmendrick stepped out into the open and said a few words.

Peter S. Beagle The Last Unicorn (1968)

The hours fly around in a circle.

Marcus Manilius

Years following years steal something ev'ry day.
At last they steal us from ourselves away.

Alexander Pope

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