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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:

I came to this world (as a ) stranger, I am tried of this land.
The time has come that I break this trap of enslavement.

Yunus Emre

Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. This is the mystery. This is what I must do.

Katherine Mansfield

Give time for a worthy cause (with eagerness) — you will be worthy and richly rewarded.

W. Clement Stone

Pop, pop, pop! Bom, bom, bom! throughout the day. No time for memorandums now. Go ahead! Liberty and Independence forever.

Davy Crockett

Take hold of your future or the future will take hold of you - be futurewise.

Patrick Dixon Futurewise (1998)

It's time.
You are light.
I guess you are afraid of what everyone is made of —
Time and Light.

St. Vincent Marry Me (2007)

You have watched the Titans walk the Earth … and you have kept stride. Perhaps you are more like them than you realize. You exist … to give hope.

Mark Waid Kingdom Come (1996)

Dust had dimmed only a fraction, not enough. Decay had brushed with its rotten fingers not nearly all it should. It was an enchanted sweet, stuck in the throat of time.

Tanith Lee Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

“What can you do?”
“I can bring you in dream to one who dreams of you.”
“Will that help me?”
“No. But you will come, because you will hope that it will.”

John C. Wright Orphans of Chaos (2005)

Meditation is an invitation to notice when we reach our limit and to not get carried away by hope and fear.

Pema Chödrön When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (1997)

Why was he thinking of her now? Fool, fool, fool. The barmaid had cast the oldest spell of all on him, a cantrip requiring only alcohol, sorrow, and time.

Jay Lake The Decaying Mansions of Memory (2011)

We're all our own prisons, we are each all our own wardens and we do our own time. I can't judge anyone else. What other people do is not really my affair unless they approach me with it. Prison's in your mind. Can't you see I'm free?

Charles Manson

You have your thoughts and I have mine. This is the fact and you can't change it even if you kill me.

Ba Jin

From the day of my coming hither
Full seventy years have passed.
Now, setting out on my final path
My two legs trample the sky.

Tsugen Jakurei

Since before time and space were,
the Tao is.
It is beyond is and is not.
How do I know this is true?
I look inside myself and see.

Laozi interpreted by Stephen Mitchell (1992)

Give lettered pomp to teeth of Time,
So "Bonnie Doon" but tarry;
Blot out the epic’s stately rhyme,
But spare his "Highland Mary!"

John Greenleaf Whittier

I am treating you as my friend, asking you to share my present minuses in the hope I can ask you to share my future pluses.

Katherine Mansfield

The tears stream down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes. What makes me weep so? From time to time. There is nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain.

Samuel Beckett The Unnamable (1954)

I'm of the opinion that science fiction writers suck at predicting the future. We mostly go around describing the present in futuristic clothes - (such as) Mary Shelley, Bill Gibson, and many others.

Cory Doctorow

Time, they say, must the best of us capture,
And travel and battle and gems and gold
No more can kindle the ancient rapture,
For even the youngest of hearts grows old.

John Buchan Prester John (1910)

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