Quotes to Bring in the New Year 2011 ~

Looking for pictures for my blog, I came across these quotations for the New Year. I think they're exceptionally wise, so I'm giving them to you without more conversation from me.

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

2.  "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

3.  "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

4.  "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, 1850

5.  "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"

6.   "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

7.   "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

8.   "We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. This book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day." ~ Edith Lovejoy Pierce

9.   "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

10.   "Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one more hole in the buckle, if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances. But on the first of January, let every man gird himself up once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in things that were and are past."  ~ Henry Ward Beecher

11.   "One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum."  ~ Sir Walter Scott

12.   "There never will exist anything permanently noble and excellent in the character which is a stranger to resolute self-denial."  ~ Sir Walter Scott

There are so many good quotations out there, but these are a few to set you thinking about the new year coming in, and your attitude toward it. The last quotation was added especially for myself, since I have been thinking this morning about the reasons I so often end up doing the exact opposite of what I have determined to do. Self-denial is almost gone from my vocabulary, I think. Our idea of denying ourselves is not eating a second piece of cake. But we should take note of all our blessings, and thank God for a New Year to start over...at least within our hearts. 

Blessings...Mimi