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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:

Manners with Fortunes, Humours turn with Climes,
Tenets with Books, and Principles with Times.

Alexander Pope

Life is arched with changing skies:
Rarely are they what they seem:
Children we of smiles and sighs—
Much we know, but more we dream.

William Winter Light and Shadow. in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922)

Could we but know
The land that ends our dark, uncertain travel.

Edmund Clarence Stedman

Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold.

Bayard Taylor

The triumph of hope over experience.

Samuel Johnson

By ignoring the past, we are encouraged to repeat its mistakes.

Audre Lorde

O, to bring back the great Homeric time,
The simple manners and the deeds sublime:
When the wise Wanderer, often foiled by Fate,
Through the long furrow drave the ploughshare straight.

Mortimer Collins

The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end.

T. S. Eliot Ash-Wednesday (1930)

Now, the redemption which we as yet await (continued Imlac), will be that of Kalki, who will come as a Silver Stallion: all evils and every sort of folly will perish at the coming of this Kalki: true righteousness will be restored, and the minds of men will be made as clear as crystal.

James Branch Cabell The Silver Stallion (1926)

We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward cross the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

Winston Churchill

The business changes. The technology changes. The team changes. The team members change. The problem isn't change, per se, because change is going to happen; the problem, rather, is the inability to cope with change when it comes.

Kent Beck Extreme Programming Explained (2000)

The time will come when every change shall cease,
This quick revolving wheel shall rest in peace:
No summer then shall glow, not winter freeze;
Nothing shall be to come, and nothing past,
But an eternal now shall ever last.

Petrarch

There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in travelling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one’s position, and be bruised in a new place.

Washington Irving Tales of a Traveler (1824)

somewhere within sight
of the tree of poetry
that is eternity wearing
the green leaves of time.

R. S. Thomas

Thus at Time's humming loom I ply.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be
Good, great, and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it.

Barack Obama

Imagine a man who doesn't believe in anything, hope for anything, doesn't love anyone. This is a description of a dead or paralyzed soul. This happens from great grief, or from an unhappy upbringing when parents make from their children's souls paralytics.

Simon Soloveychik Parenting for Everyone (1989)

A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the event of a few months.

Thomas Paine Common Sense (1776)

If you want to know what it means to be happy, look at a flower, a bird, a child; they are perfect images of the kingdom. For they live from moment to moment in the eternal now with no past and no future.

Anthony de Mello The Way to Love (1995)

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