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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:

Til that LBJ telling MLK to “make me do it” on civil rights is apocryphal. Funny, because I’ve definitely said that in my work at Wikimedia, though I was encouraging community activists to keep the pressure on for change at a movement level.

Katherine Maher

I saw Time in his workshop carving faces;
Scattered around his tools lay, blunting griefs,
Sharp cares that cut out deeply in reliefs
Of light and shade: sorrows that smooth the traces
Of what were smiles.

Frederick George Scott Time (1886)

... the dramatist has to tell his story entirely in the present tense. We must allow him a certain license in foreshortening changes in human beings which in order to be true to life require the passage of time.

Desmond MacCarthy Theatre (1955)

Time Is...
Too slow for those who wait,
Too swift for those who fear,
Too long for those who grieve,
Too short for those who rejoice,
But for those who love,
Time is Eternity. (Music and Other Poems, 1904)

Henry van Dyke

Don't tell me how to write my novel. Don't tell me you've got a better ending for it. I have no time for that.

Ray Bradbury Playboy interview (1996)

Courage is willful hope. (p86)

Joanna Russ On Strike Against God (1980)

[J]ust as the past is important, so the future is important, although the future is a little harder to predict.

Michael Atiyah Geometry in 2, 3 and 4 Dimensions (2011)

Miracles bowl me over
And often will they do so
Now I think I was asleep till I heard
The voice of the great Caruso Bring infinity home
Let me embrace it one more time
Make it the lilies of the field
Or Caruso in his prime

Joan Baez Gulf Winds (1976)

Space-time in an expanding universe changes over time, so the full quantum description of a neutrino. in that type of universe is different in the past and the future. Neutrinos would behave in both expanding and unchanging "steady state" universes.

Jayant Narlikar

The year that is coming | in a year it will pass, | I'm getting ready: | this is the news. (from The Year to Come, side B, n. 5)

Lucio Dalla

A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past. (1954), p. 75

Eric Hoffer The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

... one of the reasons that dark energy is super-interesting is it ... gives us a mechanism by which we can talk about the deep future of the universe.

Lex Fridman

Remember that time slurs over everything, let all deeds fade, blurs all writings and kills all memories. Except are only those which dig into the hearts of men by love.

Aristotle Disputed

What a sublime doctrine it is, that goodness cherished now is eternal life already entered on!

William Ellery Channing Attributed Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

A teacher affects eternity: he can never tell where his influence stops.

Hans Hofmann Misattributed

I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it for I shall not pass this way again.

Stephen Grellet Disputed

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

Eleanor Roosevelt Disputed

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Groucho Marx Misattributed

So, when a raging fever burns,
We shift from side to side by turns;
And 't is a poor relief we gain
To change the place, but keep the pain.

Isaac Watts Attributed Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1773)

Hope ever urges on, and tells us tomorrow will be better.

Tibullus Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

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