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:
Every age needs men who will redeem the time by living with a vision of the things that are to be.
I've always been more interested in the future than in the past.
If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.
You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind.
Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.
Hope is the only good that is common to all men; those who have nothing else possess hope still.
Mere by-blows are the world and we,
And time within eternity
A sheer anachronism.