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
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.
-Lord Tennyson
Then sing, young hearts that are full of cheer,
With never a thought of sorrow;
The old goes out, but the glad young year
Comes merrily in tomorrow.
-Emily Miller
Every year of my life
I grow more convinced
that it is wisest and best to fix
our attention on the beautiful and good
and dwell as little as possible on the dark and the base.
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.
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.
Each age has deemed
the new-born year
the fittest time for festal cheer.
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.
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
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
Each age has deemed the new-born year
The fittest time for festal cheer.
-Sir Walter Scott
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.
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