Wise Words For 2011

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice. To make an end is to make a beginning.
– T.S. Eliot

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul.
– G. K. Chesterton

The new year begins in a snow-storm of white vows.
– George William Curtis

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

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

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

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

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

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown. And he replied: Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.
– Minnie L. Haskins

Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.
– Brooks Atkinson

I will seek elegance rather than luxury, refinement rather than fashion. I will seek to be worthy more than respectable, wealthy and not rich. I will study hard, think quietly, talk gently, and act frankly. I will listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with an open heart. I will bear all things cheerfully, do all things bravely await occasions and hurry never. In a word I will let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious grow up through the common.
– William Ellery Channing

Look not mournfully into the past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the present. It is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future, without fear, and with a manly heart.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

When we once begin to form good resolutions, God gives us every opportunity of carrying them out.
– St John Chrysostom