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:
Thus times do shift; each thing his turne does hold;
New things succeed, as former things grow old.
The noiseless foot of Tune steals swiftly by
And ere we dream of manhood, age is nigh.
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.
Yet, do thy worst, old Time; despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.
"The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present"
Who bids me Hope, and in that charming word
Has peace and transport to my soul restor'd.
Hope makes itself every day
springs up from the tiniest places
Woe to my wretched self! from what a height of hope have I fallen!