Sunday, December 30, 2012 – The New Year and Facing the New
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
New Year’s Day is every man’s birthday. ~ Charles Lamb
New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions. ~ Mark Twain
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
The new year begins in a snow-storm of white vows. ~ George William Curtis
Now there are more overweight people in America than average-weight people. So overweight people are now average… which means, you have met your New Year’s resolution. ~ Jay Leno
Happiness is too many things these days for anyone to wish it on anyone lightly. So let’s just wish each other a bileless New Year and leave it at that ~ Judith Crist
New Year’s Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time. ~ James Agate
It wouldn’t be New Year’s if I didn’t have regrets. ~ William Thomas
The only way to spend New Year’s Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears. ~ W. H. Auden
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
We did not change as we grew older; we just became more clearly ourselves. ~ Lynn Hall, Where Have All the Tigers Gone? (1989)
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. ~ Douglas Adams
Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes. ~ Oscar Wilde
Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. ~ Dan Stanford
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn. ~ C. S. Lewis
All human wisdom is summed up in two words – wait and hope. ~ Alexandre Dumas
I confess, I do not believe in time. ~ Vladimir Nabokov
Time is the reef upon which all our frail mystic ships are wrecked. ~ Noel Coward
So little time and so little to do. ~ Oscar Levant
The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive. ~ John Sladek
The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet. ~ William Gibson
A wise God shrouds the future in obscure darkness. [Prudens futuri temporis exitum Caliginosa nocte premit deus.] – Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Carmina (III, 29, 29)
I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again… the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul. ~ J. G. Ballard
I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it. ~ Ray Bradbury
Predicting the future is easy. It’s trying to figure out what’s going on now that’s hard. ~ Fritz R. S. Dressler
It is the business of the future to be dangerous. ~ Alfred North Whitehead
FUTURE, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true, and our happiness is assured. ~ Ambrose Bierce
When you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there’s always madness. Madness is the emergency exit. ~ Alan Moore
We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like. ~ Alfred Hitchcock
Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them. ~ Charles Lamb
The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Do your damnedest in an ostentatious manner all the time. ~ George Patton
It takes a lot of time to be a genius; you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing. ~ Gertrude Stein
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. ~ Groucho Marx
May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions. ~ Joey Adams
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. ~ Alan Watts
Arrange whatever pieces come your way. ~ Virginia Woolf
The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked. ~ Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle
Time has no divisions to mark its passage; there is never a thunderstorm 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
Beginnings are always messy. ~ John Galsworthy
There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning. ~ Louis L’Amour, Lonely on the Mountain
Just Above Sunset 