An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves. ~Bill Vaughan
Many people look forward to the new year for a new start on old habits. ~Author Unknown
A New Year's resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other. ~Author Unknown
Be at War with your Vices, at Peace with your Neighbours, and let every New-Year find you a better Man. ~Quoted in Benjamin Franklin's 1755 Poor Richard's Almanac, December (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!
No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam. ~Charles Lamb, "New Year's Eve," in The London Magazine, January 1821
New Year's Day is every man's birthday. ~Charles Lamb
Never tell your resolution beforehand, or it's twice as onerous a duty. ~John Selden
Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us. ~Hal Borland
The merry year is born
Like the bright berry from the naked thorn.
~Hartley Coleridge
New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights. ~Hamilton Wright Mabie
The Old Year has gone. Let the dead past bury its own dead. The New Year has taken possession of the clock of time. All hail the duties and possibilities of the coming twelve months! ~Edward Payson Powell
Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right. ~Oprah Winfrey
Ring out wild bells to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H., 1833
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H., 1833
The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you're married to. ~P.J. O'Rourke
Every man should be born again on the first of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one hole more in the buckle, if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but, on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take interest in the things that are and are to be, and not in the things that were and are past. ~Henry Ward Beecher, "A Completed Year," 1882 December 31st (quoted in Plymouth Pulpit: A Weekly Publication of Sermons Preached by Henry Ward Beecher in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, Vol. V, Printed from Mr. T.J. Ellinwood's Stenographic Reports)
Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient short comings considerably shorter than ever. We shall also reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time. However, go in, community. New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion. ~Mark Twain
The new year begins in a snow-storm of white vows. ~George William Curtis
For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
~T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"
Approach the New Year with resolve to find the opportunities hidden in each new day. ~Michael Josephson,
We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day. ~Edith Lovejoy Pierce
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