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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:

Time is... the expression of our ignorance of the full microstate.

Carlo Rovelli Forget time (2008)

If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.

Hazel Henderson The Politics of the Solar Age (1981)

The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the Æquinox? Every hour adds unto that current arithmetick, which scarce stands one moment.

Thomas Browne

Threefold the stride of Time, from first to last!
Loitering slow, the Future creepeth —
Arrow-swift, the Present sweepeth —
And motionless forever stands the Past.

Friedrich Schiller

The "second coming" of Christ is a transformation of human consciousness, a shift from time to presence, from thinking to pure consciousness... Ch. 5

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now (1997)

Think not thy time short in this world, since the world itself is not long. The created world is but a small parenthesis in eternity, and a short interposition, for a time, between such a state of duration as was before it and may be after it.

Thomas Browne

But thou, O Hope, with eyes so fair,
What was thy delighted measure?
Still it whisper'd promised pleasure,
And bade the lovely scenes at distance hail!

William Collins

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs Address at Stanford University (2005)

All previous revolutions have been political—in them the have-not majority has attempted revengefully to pull down the economically advantaged minority. If realized, this historically greatest design revolution will joyously elevate all humanity to unprecedented heights.

Buckminster Fuller Critical Path (1981)

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

T. S. Eliot Ash-Wednesday (1930)

Truth was the only daughter of Time.

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

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

Aristotle

Hope is love's happiness, but not its life;—
How many hearts have nourished a vain flame
In silence and in secret, though they knew
They fed the scorching fire that would consume them!

Letitia Elizabeth Landon The Improvisatrice (1824)

When Earth's last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried,
When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,
We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it—lie down for an aeon or two,
Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew!

Rudyard Kipling The Seven Seas (1896)

I have hoped as many hopes and dreamed so many dreams, seen them swept aside by weather, and blown away by men, washed away in my own mistakes, that — I use to wonder if it wouldn't be better just to haul off and quit hoping.

Woody Guthrie

Now we have lit a candle to the power
Of atoms; now we know we're heirs of light
Itself...

Philip José Farmer Sestina of the Space Rocket (1953)

As the days of spring arouse all nature to a green and growing vitality, so when hope enters the soul it makes all things new. It insures the progress which it predicts. Rooted in faith, growing up into love; these make the three immortal graces of the gospel, whose intertwined arms and concurrent voices shed joy and peace over our human life.

James Freeman Clarke Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

"The life of this world is made up of three days: yesterday has gone with all that was done; tomorrow, you may never reach; but today is for you so do what you should do today."

Hasan al-Basri

While Babylon represents the principality in bondage to death in time—and time is actually a form of that bondage—Jerusalem means the emancipation of human life in a society from the rule of death and breaks through time, transcends time, anticipates within time the abolition of time.

William Stringfellow An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973)

The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.

Gabriela Sabatini

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