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:
No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent.
While there's life there’s hope, and only the dead have none.
Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?
Seven hours to law, to soothing slumber seven,
Ten to the world allot, and all to heaven.
For the ordinary man, instability—change—means dislocation, war, uncertainty, misery, and death.
If thy hope be any thing worth, it will purify thee from thy sins.
A foot of jade is of no value, an inch of time is to be prized.
It is from Eternity that the representatives of God on earth derive their Authority.