Skip to content

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:

Is Man
A child of hope? Do generations press
On generations, without progress made?
Halts the individual, ere his hairs be gray,
Perforce?

William Wordsworth The Excursion (1814)

Not heaven itself upon the past has power;
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

John Dryden Imitation of Horace (1685)

Weep no more, lady, weep no more,
Thy sorrowe is in vaine,
For violets pluckt, the sweetest showers
Will ne'er make grow againe.

Thomas Percy

The eternal landscape of the past.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson In Memoriam A.H.H (1849)

I, who have not cried since my childhood, I cry now like a child because of all that I shall never have. I cry over lost beauty and grandeur. I love everything that I should have embraced.

Henri Barbusse The Inferno (1917)

Though you are as honest as the day, fear and hate the liar. Fear and hate him when he should be feared and hated:now. Fear and hate him were he should be feared and hated:in yourselves.

E. E. Cummings an essay in the anthology The War Poets (1945)

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up...His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way.

Nikola Tesla

As long as I breathe I hope. As long as I breathe I shall fight for the future, that radiant future, in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizons of beauty, joy and happiness!

Leon Trotsky

The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.

C. S. Lewis The World's Last Night (1952)

He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend.
Eternity mourns that. ’Tis an ill cure
For life’s worst ills, to have no time to feel them.
Where sorrow ’s held intrusive and turned out,
There wisdom will not enter, nor true power,
Nor aught that dignifies humanity.

Henry Taylor Philip van Artevelde (1834)

The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation. … Both are illusions.

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now (1997)

The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives.

G. K. Chesterton The Defendant (1901)

There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.

Walter Benjamin Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.

Cesare Pavese This Business of Living (1935)

Time was a flickering gray fire constantly consuming all things, so that what appeared to be motion was actually the oxidation and reduction of possibilities, the collapse of potential matter from grace to nothingness.

Michael Swanwick Stations of the Tide (1991)

What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.

Augustine of Hippo

Time is generally the best medicine.

Ovid

Infinita est velocitas temporis quæ magis apparet respicientibus.
The swiftness of time is infinite, which is still more evident to those who look back upon the past.

Seneca the Younger

The good of other times let people state;
I think it lucky I was born so late.

Ovid

Related topics