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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 alchemy that turns compassion into love.

Seanan McGuire Down Among the Sticks and Bones (2017)

Time, to the nation as to the individual, is nothing absolute; its duration depends on the rate of thought and feeling.

John William Draper A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe (1863)

When we open up about our emotional challenges, admitting we are not perfect, we give others permission to share their struggles. Together we realize there is hope and we do not have to suffer alone.

Reyna I. Aburto

Hope is many things, but it throws itself against fact and shatters.

Pete Dunne The Feather Quest: A North American Birder's Year (1992)

Stop haunting your past and try to drop in on the future.

Antonio Tabucchi Sostiene Pereira (1994)

Waiting for the time to pass you by; hope the winds of change will change your mind.

Alessia Cara

There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.

H. G. Wells The Time Machine (1895)

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

Baruch Spinoza

Hope keeps you focused on the future, and this continued focus perpetuates your denial of the Now and therefore your unhappiness.

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now (1997)

We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

George Orwell

Time flies and draws us with it. The moment in which I am speaking is already far from me.

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux Épitres (1701)

Those who adhere to the past won't be able to cope with the future.

Willy Brandt

There are three lessons I would write, —
Three words — as with a burning pen,
In tracings of eternal light
Upon the hearts of men.

Friedrich Schiller

Now I see there is a people risen that I cannot win with gifts or honours, offices or places; but all other sects and people I can.

George Fox

An overflowing pot must be emptied before anything new can be added. If you cling to the sorrows of the past, how can you make space for the happiness and joy of the present?

Sanu Sharma

Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.

Walter Benjamin Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

Time is the most precious gift in our possession, for it is the most irrevocable.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Eternity has no gray hairs! The flowers fade, the heart withers, man grows old and dies, the world lies down in the sepulchre of ages, but time writes no wrinkles on the brow of Eternity.

Reginald Heber

Wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you.

Randy Pausch The Last Lecture (2007)

Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.

Joseph N. Welch Army–McCarthy hearings (1954)

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