Inspirational thoughts for the coming new year
New Year’s Day, opined Mark Twain, “Is the accepted time to make your regular good resolutions. “Next week, you can begin paving hell with them, as usual.”
We share this mostly because some of us enjoy cranky Mark Twain quotes, not because we necessarily agree with them.
Actually, we’re completely on board with the idea of self-improvement, and we encourage any excuse to attempt it.
What better excuse than a fresh calendar and a full 12 months with which to work?
Of course, Jan. 1 is a rather arbitrary starting point for a 12-month cycle. We could just as easily start in May and accomplish the same thing. This means even if we do blow it next week, as Twain proposed we will, there’s nothing stopping any of us from dusting ourselves off and trying to do it better the week after.
That certainly reflects how we go about things here.
That said, we’d like to share a selection of some of the less cynical observations famous people, including Twain, have made regarding a new year and its resolutions. We hope you find one or more of them useful in your own quest for excellence.
Enjoy, and have a safe and happy 2018.
***
“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
***
“Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.” – Benjamin Franklin
***
“Every time you tear a leaf off a calendar, you present a new place for new ideas and progress.” – Charles Kettering
***
“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
***
“Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering, ‘It will be happier.’” – Alfred Lord Tennyson
***
“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
***
“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
***
“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.” – Neil Gaiman
***
“To have the kind of year you want to have, something has to happen that you can’t explain why it happened. Something has to happen that you can’t coach.” – Bobby Bowden
*** “Celebrate what you want to see more of.” – Tom Peters
***
“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” – C.S. Lewis
***
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Abraham Lincoln
***
“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
***
“One resolution I have made, and try always to keep is this – to rise above the little things.” – John Burroughs
***
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain