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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:

We remain
Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past.

James Russell Lowell

Liberty and Union (United States), now and forever, one and inseparable.

Daniel Webster

I was not singing erewhile for you to follow, to understand — nor am I now…

Walt Whitman

Time means a lot to me because, you see, I, too, am also a learner and am often lost in the joy of forever developing and simplifying. If you love life, don't waste time, for time is what life is made up of.

Bruce Lee Striking Thoughts (2000)

New times demand new measures and new men;
The world advances, and in time outgrows
The laws which in our father's times were best;
And doubtless, after us, some purer scheme
Will be shaped out by wiser men than we,
Made wiser by the steady growth of truth.

James Russell Lowell Poems (1844)

Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
Do not be forever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust:
Thou know'st tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.

William Shakespeare

Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.

Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Time is at once an agony of the Present, a long torment of the Past and the terrible prospect of countless Futures. Time is also a complex of subtly intersecting realities, of unguessable consequences and undiscoverable causes, of profound tensions and dependencies.

Michael Moorcock The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

Eternity invests every state, whether of bliss or of suffering, with a mysterious and awful importance, entirely its own. It gives that weight and moment to whatever it attaches, compared to which all interests that know a period fade into absolute insignificance.

Robert Hall Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Never underestimate change. What seems simple at the top is magnified at lower echelons and is extremely disruptive. It is a festering crisis that needs attention from senior management or else loyalty, efficiency, and productivity will suffer.

Wheeler L. Baker Crisis Management: A Model For Managers (1993)

If we consider eternity, into that time never entered; eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is as a short parenthesis in a long period; and eternity had been the same as it is, though time had never been.

John Donne

Every reference-body (co-ordinate system) has its own particular time; unless we are told the reference-body to which the statement of time refers, there is no meaning in a statement of the time of an event.

Albert Einstein Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1920)

Time flies on restless pinions—constant never.
Be constant—and thou chainest time forever.

Friedrich Schiller

That is to be wise to see not merely that which lies before your feet, but to foresee even those things which are in the womb of futurity.

Terence

THE present! it is but a drop from the sea
In the mighty depths of eternity.
I love it not—it taketh its birth
Too near to the dull and the common earth.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Sometimes I think your life and mine are under the protection of some supreme being or fate, because, after many years of parallel thought, we find ourselves in the positions we now occupy.

George S. Patton

I hear a voice you cannot hear,
Which says I must not stay;
I see a hand you cannot see,
Which beckons me away.

Thomas Tickell

John Anderson my jo, John,
When we were first acquent,
Your locks were like the raven,
Your bonny brow was brent.

Robert Burns John Anderson my Jo (1790)

We do not stray out of all words into the ever silent;
We do not raise our hands to the void for things beyond hope.

Rabindranath Tagore The Gardener (1915)

We can't lose with God on our side,
We'll find strength in each tear we cry,
From now on it will be you and I,
And our ribbon in the sky,
Ribbon in the sky,
A ribbon in the sky for our love.

Stevie Wonder Ribbon in the Sky (1969)

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