New Year’s Eve is all about parties, celebrating, merriment…and trying to stay awake long enough to watch a giant light-up ball be lowered slowly down a pole on the top of a building in New York City while a million revelers sing “Auld Lang Syne” in unison. As the years have gone on, that’s the New Year’s Eve we’re most familiar with.
But after all the guests have gone home and the dishes have been cleaned and the calendar has been flipped, what are you left with? Well, a new year, that’s what. And that means 365 days of new possibilities and 52 weeks worth of opportunities to change anything you want about yourself and your life.
But you can’t do it alone. You need motivation, someone or something to light a fire under you and set you on the fast track to self-improvement. In short, you need wisdom, and you need it in the form of pithy, witty, and/or insightful quotes from some of the great thinkers of our time (real or otherwise).
Here are 50 New Year’s quotes to get your year started right.
Inspiring New Year’s quotes
- “Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365-page book. Write a good one.” — Brad Paisley
- “Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.” — Oprah Winfrey
- “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
- “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
- “Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.” — Benjamin Franklin
- “Take a leap of faith and begin this wondrous new year by believing.” — Sarah Ban Breathnach
- “New Year’s Day is every man’s birthday.” — Charles Lamb
- “Every time you tear a leaf off a calendar, you present a new place for new ideas.” —Charles Kettering
- “The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with but whether it is the same problem you had last year.” — John Foster Dulles
- “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
- “And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.”— Rainer Maria Rilke
- “We spend January 1 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
- “A new year. A fresh, clean start! It’s like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on! A day full of possibilities!” — Bill Watterson
- “What a wonderful thought it is that some of the best days of our lives haven’t even happened yet.” — Anne Frank
- “Every single year, we’re a different person. I don’t think we’re the same person all of our lives.”— Steven Spielberg
- “Don’t live the same year 75 times and call it a life.” — Robin Sharma
- “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
- “One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: To rise above the little things.” — John Burroughs
- “If you asked me for my New Year resolution, it would be to find out who I am.” — Cyril Cusack
- “A new heart for a New Year, always!” — Charles Dickens
- “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language, and next year’s words await another voice.” — T.S. Eliot
- “For eleven months and maybe about twenty days each year, we concentrate upon the shortcomings of others, but for a few days at the turn of New Year, we look at our own. It is a good habit.” — Arthur H. Sulzberger
- “The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul…” — G.K. Chesterton
Funny New Year’s quotes
- “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
- “Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. Middle age is when you’re forced to.” — Bill Vaughan
- “The new year begins in a snow-storm of white vows.” — George William Curtis
- “May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions!” — Joey Adams
- “Listen, I wish I could tell you it gets better, but it doesn’t get better. You get better.” — Joan Rivers
- “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
- “‘Out with the old, in with the new’ is a fitting expression for a holiday that is based on vomiting.” — Andy Borowitz
- “New Year’s Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.” — James Agate
- “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.” — Anaïs Nin
- “May the New Year bring you courage to break your resolutions early! My own plan is to swear off every kind of virtue, so that I triumph even when I fall!” — Aleister Crowley
- “Happiness is too many things these days for anyone to wish it on anyone lightly. So, let’s just wish each other a New Year.” — Judith Crist
- “I think it would be much more sensible if resolutions began generally on January the second.” — Helen Fielding, “Bridget Jones’s Diary”
- “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
Hopeful New Year’s quotes
- “Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering ‘it will be happier.'” — Alfred Lord Tennyson
- “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
- “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
- “When that ball drops at midnight — and it will drop — let’s remember to be nice to each other, kind to each other. And not just tonight but all year long.” — Claire Morgan (Hilary Swank) in “New Year’s Eve”
- “Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.” — Susan Sontag
- “Happy New Year. May we all have a vision now and then of a world where every neighbor is a friend.” — ABBA
- “A long December and there’s reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last.” — Counting Crows
Quotes about new beginnings
- “No matter how hard the past, you can always begin again.” — Buddha
- “And suddenly you know: It’s time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings.” — Meister Eckhart
- “I love beginnings. If I were in charge of calendars, every day would be January 1.” — Jerry Spinelli
- “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” — Seneca
- “There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.” — C.S. Lewis
- “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” — T.S. Eliot
- “It’s a new dawn/It’s a new day/It’s a new life, for me/And I’m feeling good.” — Nina Simone
