The new year is a time of reflection, renewal, and hope. It’s a moment when we bid farewell to the old and usher in the new — often accompanied by resolutions, goals, and aspirations.
This transition is not just a change in the calendar, but an opportunity to start afresh, to reevaluate our paths, and to rejuvenate our hopes for the journey ahead.
Throughout history, numerous thinkers, writers, and public figures have written and spoken about the transition of the new year. Their words capture the optimism, challenges, and introspection that the new year brings. These quotes serve as reminders that each year is a chance to grow, to learn, and to embrace new possibilities.
As you step into the new year, may these quotes inspire and guide you and help you start your year right.
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The Best Quotes About the New Year
Famous Quotes
“Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on.”
— Hal Borland
“Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.”
— Benjamin Franklin
“Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.”
— Susan Sontag
“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Remove ‘shoulds’ from your vocabulary this year. Start your journey of self-love now.”
— Kelly Martin
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
— George Eliot
“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language, and next year’s words await another voice.”
— T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.”
— Henry David Thoreau
“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
— Kierkegaard
“A new heart for a New Year, always!”
— Charles Dickens
Inspirational Quotes
“Approach the new year with resolve to find the opportunities hidden in each new day.”
— Michael Josephson
“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
“Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”
— Mary Oliver
“What the new year brings to you will depend a great deal on what you bring to the new year.”
— Vern McLellan
“Well, we have a whole new year ahead of us. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all be a little more gentle with each other, a little more loving, and have a little more empathy, and maybe, next year at this time we’d like each other a little more.”
— Judy Garland
“On New Year’s Eve, the whole world celebrates the fact that a date changes. Let us celebrate the dates on which we change the world.”
— Akilnathan Logeswaran
“Life is about change, sometimes it’s painful, sometimes it’s beautiful, but most of the time it’s both.”
— Kristin Kreuk
“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“What a wonderful thought it is that some of the best days of our lives haven't even happened yet.”
— Anne Frank
“Whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right.”
— Henry Ford
“The attraction of New Year is this: The year changes, and in that change we believe that we can change with it. It is far more difficult, however, to change yourself than turn the calendar to a new page.”
— R. Joseph Hoffmann
“If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.”
— Maya Angelou
“Don’t live the same year 75 times and call it a life.”
— Robin Sharma
“Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand and melting like a snowflake.”
— Francis Bacon Sr.
“Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.”
— Helen Keller
New Year, New Beginnings
“Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365-page book. Write a good one.”
— Brad Paisley
“This is a new year. A new beginning. And things will change.”
— Taylor Swift
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”
— Socrates
“We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Every single year, we’re a different person. I don’t think we’re the same person all of our lives.”
— Steven Spielberg
“Never underestimate the power you have to take your life in a new direction.”
— Germany Kent
“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”
— Thomas Jefferson
“A New Year… a fresh, clean start. It’s like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on.”
— Bill Watterson
“It’s never too late — never too late to start over, never too late to be happy.”
— Jane Fonda
“We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.”
— Joseph Campbell
“New year is another opportunity of seeing life with little more caring, compassion, maturity and beauty.”
— Amit Ray
“It’s never too late to become who you want to be. I hope you live a life that you’re proud of, and if you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
“With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt
“If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.”
— Fred DeVito
“Wouldn’t it be nice if change took just a moment?
Wouldn’t it be nice if it were that easy?
Midnight and we’re new. Midnight and the past erased. Midnight and we’re free.”
— Jamie Tworkowski
“Change takes more than a moment, but maybe there’s also something to this celebration of a moment, something to the way it speaks to us, something to the way we fear it, and dream it to be true. Maybe it’s the most honest moment of the year.”
— Jamie Tworkowski
New Year’s Eve Quotes
“Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.”
— Oprah Winfrey
“One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: To rise above the little things.”
— John Burroughs
“In our perfect ways. In the ways we are beautiful. In the ways we are human. We are here. Happy New Year’s. Let’s make it ours.”
— Beyoncé
“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”
— C.S. Lewis
“So this is the new year
And I don't feel any different
The clanking of crystal
Explosions off in the distance —
So this is the new year
And I have no resolutions
For self-assigned penance
For problems with easy solutions”
— Death Cab for Cutie
“To the old, long life and treasure; to the young, all health and pleasure.”
— Ben Jonson
“A year of ending and beginning, a year of loss and finding… and all of you were with me through the storm. I drink your health, your wealth, your fortune for long years to come, and I hope for many more days in which we can gather like this.”
— C.J. Cherryh
“Stir the eggnog. Lift the toddy. Happy New Year, everybody!”
— Phyllis McGinley
“Tonight’s December thirty-first,
Something is about to burst.
The clock is crouching, dark and small,
Like a time bomb in the hall.
Hark, it’s midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year!”
— Ogden Nash
“Never make a resolution which won’t be as important on the eighth of April or the tenth of July as it is on the first of January.”
— Cary Grant
“With dawn of the new year on the horizon, I resolved to exert my will on the world.”
— Holly Black
“Each age has deemed the new-born year
The fittest time for festal cheer.”
— Sir Walter Scott
New Year’s Day Quotes
“And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“Take a leap of faith and begin this wondrous new year by believing.”
— Sarah Ban Breathnach
“We spend January 1st 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
“This bright new year is given me
To live each day with zest
To daily grow and try to be
My highest and my best!”
— William Arthur Ward
“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
Funny Quotes
“An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.”
— William E. Vaughan
“May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions!”
— Joey Adams
“Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.”
— Oscar Wilde
“Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. Middle age is when you’re forced to.”
— William E. Vaughan
“Don’t make plans. Make options.”
— Jennifer Aniston
“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
“Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
More Quotes About the New Year
“Let our New Year’s resolution be this: We will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity, in the finest sense of the word.”
— Göran Persson
“Cheers to a gracious New Year. May we uphold the fullness of God’s grace, goodness and goodwill.”
— Lailah Gifty Akita
“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
“Life’s not about expecting, hoping and wishing, it’s about doing, being and becoming.”
— Mike Dooley
“A year of ending and beginning, a year of loss and finding… and all of you were with me through the storm. I drink your health, your wealth, your fortune for long years to come, and I hope for many more days in which we can gather like this.”
— C.J. Cherryh
“There comes a day when you realize turning the page is the best feeling in the world, because you realize there's so much more to the book than the page you were stuck on.”
— Zayn Malik
“Celebrate what you want to see more of.”
— Tom Peters
“The last hours, minutes, and seconds for disappearing old year to start a new year; it only can be beneficial and fruitful when each one of us also changes and starts a new and fair attitude and character that respects humanity and eliminates all sorts of distinctions to become an equal and peaceful planet.”
— Ehsan Sehgal
“The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul.”
— Gilbert K. Chesterton
“The best is yet to come.”
— Frank Sinatra
