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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:

We shall see what we shall see. We have the start now; the developments will follow in time.

Wilhelm Röntgen The New Marvel in Photography (1896)

Oh, Sirin, how could you? You know as well as I do how dangerous scrying the future can be. Half the time what it shows you wouldn’t happen if you hadn’t foreseen it.

Michael Swanwick The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993)

Yes, it was swell to sleep when you were looking forward to something. Time flies by and you don’t even hear the rustle of its wings.

Fredric Brown

Holden yelled in frustration. The universe kept waiting until he was thoroughly beaten, then tossing him a nibble of hope only to yank it away again.

James S. A. Corey Abaddon's Gate (2013)

From a distance, there is harmony
And it echoes through the land
It's the voice of hope, it's the voice of peace
It's the voice of every man.

Julie Gold

Thus heavenly Hope is all serene,
But earthly Hope, how bright soe’er,
Still fluctuates o’er this changing scene,
As false and fleeting as ’tis fair.

Chauncy Hare Townshend

Life is the spirit incarnate in time.

Buckminster Fuller

Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word "understanding."

Werner Heisenberg Physics and Philosophy (1958)

What we hoped was that we could stop the coming end of the world.

Ken Kesey Trip of a Lifetime (1999)

I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time.

Yann Martel Life of Pi (2001)

The time is — time. The place is anywhere.
The voices speak to you across the air
To say that once again a child is born.
A child is born.

Stephen Vincent Benét A Child is Born (1942)

Time is beginning to flow again.

Simone de Beauvoir All Men are Mortal (1946)

Time is the one thing money can’t buy.

Charles Stross The Apocalypse Codex (2012)

Our only hope for tomorrow is peace now.

Lloyd Alexander

The heart of change is in the emotions.

John Kotter The Heart of Change (2002)

There is hope: in a fiercely independent Supreme court, a crusading free press and an absolute commitment to representative democracy. It's time to slip those last reins of rundown colonial institutions.

Mark Tully

Only faith can keep what hope promises.

Adrienne von Speyr Lumina and New Lumina (1969)

Every noon as the clock hands arrive at twelve,
I want to tie the two arms together,
And walk out of the bank carrying time in bags.

Robert Bly

By the side of this passage is a sketch of a cage with a bird sitting in it.

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

Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.

George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion (1912)

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