Happy New Year Quotes - New Year Eve Quotes - New Year Resolutions

Not to miss: Read our excellent selection of Christmas Quotes.

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 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"


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


New Year's Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
Mark Twain


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

Each age has deemed the new-born year
The fittest time for festal cheer.
Walter Scott


Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
Oscar Wilde


Glory to God in highest heaven,
Who unto man His Son hath given;
While angels sing with tender mirth,
A glad new year to all the earth.
Martin Luther


We meet today
To thank Thee for the era done,
And Thee for the opening one.
John Greenleaf Whittier

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 day 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 no interest in the things that were and are past.
Henry Ward Beecher


One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: To rise above the little things.
John Burroughs


Of all sound of all bells... most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year.
Charles Lamb


A happy New Year! Grant that I
May bring no tear to any eye
When this New Year in time shall end
Let it be said I've played the friend,
Have lived and loved and labored here,
And made of it a happy year.
Edgar Guest


It wouldn't be New Year's if I didn't have regrets.
William Thomas


We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives... not looking for flaws, but for potential.
Ellen Goodman


May all your troubles last as long as your New Year's resolutions.
Joey Adams


He who breaks a resolution is a weakling;
He who makes one is a fool.
F.M. Knowles


The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.
G.K. Chesterton

Happiness is too many things these days for anyone to wish it on anyone lightly. So let's just wish each other a bileless New Year and leave it at that.
Judith Crist

New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
James Agate


I think in terms of the day's resolutions, not the year's.
Henry Moore


Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.
Thomas Mann


I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.
Anaïs Nin


Why won't they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can't they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping - rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year's and Easter and Christmas - But, goodness, why need they do it?
John Dos Passos


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.
Mark Twain


Every man regards his own life as the New Year's Eve of time.
Jean Paul Richter


The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.
W.H. Auden


Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.
Oprah Winfrey

I do think New Year's resolutions can't technically be expected to begin on New Year's Day, don't you? Since, because it's an extension of New Year's Eve, smokers are already on a smoking roll and cannot be expected to stop abruptly on the stroke of midnight with so much nicotine in the system. Also dieting on New Year's Day isn't a good idea as you can't eat rationally but really need to be free to consume whatever is necessary, moment by moment, in order to ease your hangover. I think it would be much more sensible if resolutions began generally on January the second.
Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary

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


Resolutions for avoiding misery:

Choose to love—rather than hate.
Choose to smile—rather than frown.
Choose to build—rather than destroy.
Choose to persevere—rather than quit.
Choose to praise—rather than gossip.
Choose to heal—rather than wound.
Choose to give—rather than take.
Choose to act—rather than delay.
Choose to forgive—rather than curse.
Choose to pray—rather than despair.


Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.
Benjamin Franklin


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


Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you're forced to.
Bill Vaughan

Not to miss: Read our excellent selection of Christmas Quotes.