Quotes & Sayings About A Better New Year

We are flooded with books; books come pouring out of the publishing meat grinder. And, the quality has dropped severely. We may be able to print a book better, but intrinsically the book, perhaps, is not better than it was. We have a backlist of books, superb books, by Margaret Wise Brown, by Ruth Krauss, by lots of people. I'd much rather we just took a year off, a moratorium: no more books. For a year, maybe two - just stop publishing. And get those old books back, let the children see them! Books don't go out of fashion with children; they only go out of fashion with adults. So that kids are deprived of the works of art which are no longer around simply because new ones keep coming out.

from The Openhearted Audience (1980) — Maurice Sendak

Let this coming year be better than all the others. Vow to do some of the things you have always wanted to do but could not find the time. Call up a forgotten friend. Drop an old grudge, and replace it with some pleasant memories. Vow not to make a promise you do not think you can keep. Walk tall, and smile more. You will look 10 years younger. Do not be afraid to say, I love you. Say it again. They are the sweetest words in the world. — Ann Landers

At Garvin High we were dealt a hard dose of reality this year. People hate. That's our reality. People hate and are hated and carry grudges and want punishments ... I don't know if it's possible to take hate away from people. Not even people like us, who've seen firsthand what hate can do. We're all hurting. We're all going to be hurting for a long time. And we, probably more than anyone else out there, will be searching for a new reality every day. A better one ... But in order to change reality you have to be willing to listen and to learn. And to hear. To actually hear. — Jennifer Brown

A few years ago I switched to an entirely different kind of New Year's resolution. Instead of vowing to improve, I pledge to do a better job of accepting my bad habits - to stop worrying about failing to be the person I used to imagine I could be. — Mel White

I want to be better every year, just like everyone else does. From what I learned from last year, I feel a lot more comfortable. I know the game and how it goes up here. You get in certain situations the first time, you really don't know what to expect. Now that I've been in them-and I've been in every situation possible last year-there's nothing new to come at me. — Ryan Zimmerman

Wouldn't have said this a year ago - that's how fast our understanding is changing," said Tonigan, the University of New Mexico researcher, "but belief seems critical. You don't have to believe in God, but you do need the capacity to believe that things will get better. — Charles Duhigg

Dogs come to quantum physics in a better position than most humans. They approach the world with fewer preconceptions than humans, and always expect the unexpected. A dog can walk down the same street every day for a year, and it will be a new experience every day. Every rock, every bush, every tree will be sniffed as if it had never been sniffed before. If dog treats appeared out of empty space in the middle of a kitchen, a human would freak out, but a dog would take it in stride. Indeed, for most dogs, the spontaneous generation of treats would be vindication - they always expect treats to appear at any moment, for no obvious reason. — Chad Orzel

And to remember both our triumphs and our missteps, our promises made and broken, the times we opened ourselves up to great adventures or closed ourselves down for fear of getting hurt, because that's what new year's all about, getting another chance, a chance to forgive. to do better, to do more, to give more, to love more, and to stop worrying about what if and start embracing what will be. so 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

Well, you know, what's better? To play a character who stays stuck in the same baggage year after year, or to play a character who gets beyond that and goes to a new level? — Andreas Katsulas

Take a stand, America! You deserve better. Resolve to live life vibrantly by looking to family, faith, and freedom in this new year! — Sarah Palin

That's enough!" Holly scrambled out of her seat, too. "My three-year-old behaves better than all of you." She looked down at LJ, who was trying to stuff a fry up his nostril. "And that's not saying a whole lot. — Nicole Williams

At the beginning of a new year, many people have nothing better to do than to make a list of bad deeds and resolve from now on - how many such "from-now-ons" have there already been! - to begin with better intentions, but they are still stuck in the middle of their paganism. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

You interrogated a man at Hades's compound a year ago. I heard what you did to him. I can't have dead prisoners here; we have to be better than that." "I didn't kill him," I objected, remembering the murderous bastard who'd tried to kill Hades before he'd been caught. Unfortunately we hadn't stopped him from killing his own wife and children. "You took his hands. You know he killed himself in our jail?" "Yeah, well, I'm not going to kill anyone. Just talk. They wanted to kill me back in Southampton, now they want to take me to talk. I'd like to know why. And I heard your prisoner died by getting into a fight with another prisoner." "He walked up to a cave troll and kicked him. The troll tore his head off and threw it fifty feet away. What would you call that?" "Suicide by troll. That's new. — Steve McHugh

The uninitiated often assumed that undergraduate students were at the bottom rung, but undergrads were the paying customers, or at least their parents were. And paying customers needed to be kept happy. Grad students worked for the school as teaching and research assistants--TAs and RAs--but weren't really proper employees, and as such they weren't entitled to the benefits that, say, a cataloger in the Coffey Library received. Then there was the fact that they had to learn to leave behind passive studying and test taking, which was what most of them had been taught in their school careers up to that point, and learn how to actively attack research problems and come up with new ideas, all while being poorly paid. Like Helen had said, a not insignificant number of grad students left after a year instead of sticking around to work on obtaining their PhDs. Who could blame them? Industry paid more and had better benefits. — Neve Maslakovic

Selling your house, giving away possessions, working multiple jobs for a period of time, going back to school and moving in with friends or relatives, sharing a car with your partner and riding your bike more, investing all your savings in a new venture, living on the other side of the world for a year - your friends may not understand, your co-workers may not get it, your extended family may think you've lost your mind - that's okay. Better to receive some odd looks and have a few people roll their eyes than spend your days wondering, What if I did that . . . ? Take that step. Make that leap. Try that new thing. If it helps clarify your ikigai, if it gets you up in the morning, if it's good for you and the world, do it. — Rob Bell

Sometimes we know the best thing to do, but fail to do it. New year's resolutions are often like that. We make resolutions because we know it would be better for us to lose weight, or get fit, or spend more time with our children. The problem is that a resolution is generally easier to break than it is to keep. — Peter Singer

The problem with New Year's resolutions - and resolutions to 'get in better shape' in general, which are very amorphous - is that people try to adopt too many behavioral changes at once. It doesn't work. I don't care if you're a world-class CEO - you'll quit. — Tim Ferriss

This is new. Old Quinn would not have worn a skirt on her first day of sophomore year. Old Quinn would have worn a pair of jeans (hole in the knee? even better) and a t-shirt advertising the Providence Prep volleyball team, or some other sports team I didn't play for. — Selena Brooks

What do you want, Allie? Tell me one thing you've been dying to do but haven't gotten around to doing."

Her forehead furrows as she thinks it over. "Well. I've been wanting to start a new cleanse, but I keep putting it off."

"I have no idea what that means."

"I go on these juice cleanses a couple times a year," she explains. "It sucks, because you're stuck on a liquid diet for two whole weeks, but you feel so much better afterward."

"You're a fucking weirdo. Pick something else. Something normal."

She pauses, deep in thought again, and then her expression brightens. "I've always wanted to learn how to salsa dance."

Fuck. That's such a chick thing to say. "Then do it," I tell her. — Elle Kennedy

Back in 1995, Munger had given a talk at Harvard Business School called "The Psychology of Human Misjudgment." If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives. FedEx couldn't get its night shift to finish on time; they tried everything to speed it up but nothing worked - until they stopped paying night shift workers by the hour and started to pay them by the shift. Xerox created a new, better machine only to have it sell less well than the inferior older ones - until they figured out the salesmen got a bigger commission for selling the older one. "Well, you can say, 'Everybody knows that,'" said Munger. "I think I've been in the top five percent of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther." Munger's — Michael Lewis

I don't get it: they re-package the same shitty football games every year, update a few stats, call it a new game and millions of suckers keep buying them. What's the point? Why not just go outside and play real football instead? Or even better yet, get bent. Nobody likes football. — Maddox

I moved to New York last year and I love it. It's a huge change and I've always wanted to spend time there. It's like a more intense London, and everything's up a few notches. The lights are brighter, the pace is faster and the food's better. — Rachel Weisz

When you incline to have new clothes, look first well over the old ones, and see if you cannot shift with them another year, either by scouring, mending, or even patching if necessary. Remember, a patch on your coat, and money in your pocket, is better and more creditable, than a writ on your back, and no money to take it off. — Benjamin Franklin

And we need this. It could save us a year. Without it all we got is a regular manhunt. For a guy already four months AWOL, with a brand-new foreign passport. Instead of that we could have a Saudi kid in a pink shirt and pointed shoes lead us directly to him. Right here and now. Who wouldn't take that deal? The future means nothing if we don't live to see it." "So you broke the law, but only because you thought you had a good reason. You and everyone else. There are lots of good reasons. Too many good reasons. Which is why we have a special structure, to decide between them, when they compete one against the other. That structure is called the National Security Council. We weigh things up and we judge priorities. You just blew a year's hard work, major. You should resign. Before the after-action report comes out. You'll get a better deal that way." "OK," Reacher said. "I will, if it turns out bad. — Lee Child

On Christmas. "Santa Claus represents God on assistance," said Clyde.
"Santa Claus is a negative-idealed god, the pagan god of material worship," Leon stated. "Christmas means the rebirth, regeneration. Some people have Christmas every day. The Christmas tree stands up and either the wife trims it or they trim it together with righteous-idealed sexual intercourse. Or the husband prays to God through his Christmas tree and trims his bodily Christmas tree. Christ-mast; the mast of Christ, the upstanding penis - that's what it means to me."
"Santa Claus is a good symbolization for Christmas," said Joseph. "Department stores, shopping, the coming of the New Year. Christmas means better business in the stores. — Milton Rokeach

There isn't going to be any turning point ... There isn't going to be any next-month-it'll-be-better, next fucking year, next fucking life. You don't have any time to wait for. You just got to look around you and say, "So this is it. This is really all there is to it. This little thing." Everybody needing such little things and they can't get them. Everybody needing just a little ... confidence from somebody else and they can't get it. Everybody, everybody fighting to protect their little feelings. Everybody, you know, like reaching out tentatively but drawing back. It's so shallow and seems so ... fucking ... it seems like such a shame. It's so close to being like really right and good and open and amorphous and giving and everything. But it's not. And it ain't gonna be.
September 1969
quoted in "The New Yorker" 9 August 1999 — Janis Joplin

Here I sit, sober and perhaps even lucid, on the sort of winter's day that makes you realize a New Year is just around the corner and you've got very little to show for it, but if you are going to get anything done on this planet, you better pick it up with both hands and DO IT YOURSELF. — Peter Laughner

As we did every New Year's Eve we made ridiculous resolutions that no one would keep, and quietly we all wondered what the coming year would hold, each of us praying for our own private miracles. Good health. Better health. A marriage for this child, a good job for another. This hopefulness was something hardwired into our psyches, that a new year might mean some monumental something wonderful could happen to bring us happiness at a level we had never known. A new year was a chance to start over. Maybe even, just maybe, there would be peace on earth for one entire day. — Dorothea Benton Frank

Today, we're taking a break from the concerns and the bustle of the work-a-day world. But we're also making a new beginning ... Let us renew our faith that as free men and women we still have the power to better our lives, and let us resolve to face the challenges of the new year holding that conviction firmly in our hearts. That, after all, is our greatest strength and our greatest gift as Americans. — Ronald Reagan

Girls did not always organize their thinking about themselves around the physical. Before World War I, self-improvement meant being less self-involved, less vain: helping others, focusing on schoolwork, becoming better read, and cultivating empathy. Author Joan Jacobs Brumberg highlighted this change in her book The Body Project by comparing the New Year's resolutions of girls at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: "Resolved," wrote a girl in 1892, "to think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self-restrained in conversations and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others. — Peggy Orenstein

January is always a good month for behavioral economics: Few things illustrate self-control as vividly as New Year's resolutions. February is even better, though, because it lets us study why so many of those resolutions are broken. — Sendhil Mullainathan

It is difficult not to believe that the next year will be better than the old one! And this illusion is not wrong. Future is always good, no matter what happens. It will always give us what we need and what we want in secret. It will always bless us with right gifts. Thus in a deeper sense our belief in the New Year cannot deceive us. — Kersti Bergroth

I think I should learn to get along better with people," he explained to Miss Benson one day, when she came upon him in the corridor of the literature building and asked what he was doing wearing a fraternity pledge pin (wearing it on the chest of the new V-neck pullover in which his mother said he looked so collegiate). Miss Benson's response to his proposed scheme for self-improvement was at once so profound and so simply put that Zuckerman went around for days repeating the simple interrogative sentence to himself; like Of Times and the River, it verified something he had known in his bones all along, but in which he could not placed his faith until it had been articulated by someone of indisputable moral prestige and purity : "Why," Caroline Benson asked the seventeen-year-old boy, "should you want to learn a thing like that? — Philip Roth

The whole point to New Years is not just to have a new year. But that we should be new, better and different people. That is why we exercise to RE-NEW our bodies. That is why we write GOALS to get a Renewed sense of our potential. That is why we make RE-SOLUTIONS because we resolve that there are solutions inside of us that we have not tapped into. So don't waste each New Years season. Maximize it! Start fresh using a new perspective for it will enable you to tap into a new season with greater capacity. — Stella Payton

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: "Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown." And he replied: "Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way." — Minnie Louise Haskins

I feel like I have another level every year that I start a new season of basketball. If I continue to keep growing, and make everything consistent, I'm going to get better and better each year. — Victor Oladipo

Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man. — Benjamin Franklin

What I have learned from the year past is something about miracles
miracles of healing and answered prayer and unexpected happy endings. Each came quietly and simply, on tiptoe, so that I hardly knew it had occurred.
All this makes me realize that miracles are everyday things. Not only the sudden, great good fortune, wafting in on a new wind from the sky. They are almost routine, yet miracles just the same.
Every time something hard becomes easier; every time you adjust to a situation which, last week, you didn't know existed; every time a kindness falls as softly as the dew; or someone you love who was ill grows better; every time a blessing comes, not with trumpet and fanfare, but silently as night, you have witnessed a miracle. — Faith Baldwin

Dad is a new person. A person who has learned that forgiveness is better then revenge. Next year, we'll teach him that heart attacks are not like women. You just can't keep having them! — Christopher Titus

I don't know how satisfied you can be when we still have a losing record. We feel like we're definitely playing better. The reality is we're about to find out. Our toughest West Coast trip is normally the circus trip in November. This year, they're flip-flopped. We did well on the first West Coast trip 3-3. Now, this is a big one. All these teams Dallas, New Orleans, Phoenix, Utah, Denver, Sacramento and the Los Angeles Clippers are quality teams. Each team is really playing well. It's going to be a big challenge for us. — Scott Skiles

The second step to achieving your goals in the New Year involves action and this is where many people run off track. The life we are living and have known to this point is comfortable and easy. Therefore we find it hard to establish new habits and routines even if we know they will bring us a better life. Our old belief system drags us back into the familiar. It is hard to overcome and we often experience small setbacks. This is the time to go back and look at your goals. Read your goal statement repeatedly and remind yourself of what you want and why. — Bob Proctor

Let each new year find you a better person. — Benjamin Franklin

Outside the seasons passed: sun, snow, spring green, October storms ... was this a vision of my future? When would the shunning hero come, to set the clock if my life in motion again? Would he come some morning, or in the night? In April or December? This year? Next year? I shuddered. No, I wouldn't just sit and wait. I wanted to go out.
Maybe there were new men out there, better men, men who'd just been waiting for me. Somewhere someone is always waiting for someone. — Eva Heller

People are far better at noticing how they're different than how they're the same. I see it year after year when I'm training new recruits. And war only brings it out more strongly. It turns everyone into patriots.' One corner of his mouth turned up. 'Not that I object to people being proud of their country, obviously. But there's a difference between that and hating everyone else's. — A.F.E. Smith

You know, you keep on innovating, you keep on making better stuff. And if you always want the latest and greatest, then you have to buy a new iPod at least once a year. — Steve Jobs

And keep in mind that the you that makes life worthy of living today won't be the same you that makes life worth living this time next year. Identities aren't meant to be permanent. They're like cars: they take us from one place to another. We work, travel, and seek adventure in them until they break down beyond repair. At that point, living well means finding a new model that better suits us for a new moment. — Kate Bornstein

'Old times' never come back and I suppose it's just as well. What comes back is a new morning every day in the year, and that's better. — George Edward Woodberry

Used to the conditions of a capitalistic environment, the average American takes it for granted that every year business makes something new and better accessible to him. Looking backward upon the years of his own life, he realizes that many implements that were totally unknown in the days of his youth and many others which at that time could be enjoyed only by a small minority are now standard equipment of almost every household. He is fully confident that this trend will prevail also in the future. He simply calls it the American way of life and does not give serious thought to the question of what made this continuous improvement in the supply of material goods possible. — Ludwig Von Mises

To make 2013 (or any other)your year, keep it simple:
1) Count your blessings first
2) Whatever you did last year, Do it better
3) Go step by step, One day at a time.
4) Create/make your own opportunities.
5) Believe in your abilities at all times,
6) Qutting is not an option. Keep Going.
7) Finish what you started — Pablo

You replace every molecule of every cell in your body within the course of only one year. I am not being flip when I refer to the "new you." It is quite literally possible, no matter how bad you are feeling or eating today, to be utterly transformed in just 365 days. But it won't take you that long. You can be feeling significantly better in just a couple of days and make lasting changes to your health within a month. — Woodson Merrell

A hundred years ago, it could take you the better part of a year to get from New York to California; whereas today, because of equipment problems at O'Hare, you can't get there at all. — Dave Barry