Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.
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:
Time softly there
Laughs through the abyss of radiance with the gods.
The heart bowed down by weight of woe
To weakest hope will cling.
Who in life’s battle firm doth stand
Shall bear hope’s tender blossoms
Into the silent land!
Oh seize the instant time; you never will
With waters once passed by impel the mill.
Take hold of the future or the future will take hold of you -- be futurewise.
Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart, and you'll never walk alone, you'll never walk alone.
Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away.
The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency.