50 New Year’s Quotes to Get You Pumped for 2021

By Rachel Bowie

| ???. 30, 2020

Additional reporting by Greta Heggeness

We know New Year’s resolutions aren’t for everyone, but there’s something so uplifting about wiping the slate clean come January 1. Even if you aren’t one for upheaving your life every year, now is as good a time as any to set aside New Year’s superstitions and refocus on your priorities.

Here, 50 new year quotes from our favorite thinkers and writers who reflect on what a fresh start means to them.

1. “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

2. “New Year’s resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.” - James Agate

3. “Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.” - Oprah Winfrey

4. “And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

5. “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice.” - T.S. Eliot

6. “New Year—a new chapter, new verse, or just the same old story? Ultimately we write it. The choice is ours.” - Alex Morritt

7. “The road ahead is not some predetermined path that I am forced to trod, but it is a rich byway that I can help create.” - Craig D. Lounsbrough

8. “What the New Year brings to you will depend a great deal on what you bring to the New Year.” - Vern McLellan

9. “This is a new year. A new beginning. And things will change.” - Taylor Swift

10. “Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

11. “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

12. “Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.” - Oscar Wilde

13. “Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.” - Oprah Winfrey

14. “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

15. “A new heart for a New Year, always!” - Charles Dickens

16. “One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: To rise above the little things.” - John Burroughs

17. “Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365-page book. Write a good one.” - Brad Paisley

18. “May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions.” - Joey Adams

19. “New year is the glittering light to brighten the dream-lined pathway of future.” - Munia Khan

20. “With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.” - Eleanor Roosevelt

21. “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

22. “May the New Year bring you courage to break your resolutions early.” - Aleister Crowley

23. “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other.” - Abraham Lincoln

24. “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

25. “Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every New Year find you a better man.” - Benjamin Franklin

26. “Every time you tear a leaf off a calendar, you present a new place for new ideas.” - Charles Kettering

27. “Take a leap of faith and begin this wondrous New Year by believing.” - Sarah Ban Breathnach

28. “A New Year…a fresh, clean start. It’s like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on.” - Bill Watterson

29. “Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.” - Susan Sontag

30. “The New Year stands before us, like a chapter in a book, waiting to be written.” - Melody Beattie

31. “It wouldn’t be New Year’s if I didn’t have regrets.” - William Thomas

32. “Enter this new year with a gratitude for this new chance to create your dreams.” - Avina Celeste

33. “The beginning is the most important part of the work.” - Plato

34. “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

35. “New Year’s Day is every man’s birthday.” - Charles Lamb

36. “I would say happy New Year but it’s not happy, it’s exactly the same as last year except colder.” - Robert Clark

37. “Celebrate endings, for they precede new beginnings.” - Jonathan Lockwood Huie

38. “A very wise man once told me that you can’t look back—you just have to put the past behind you and find something better in your future.” - Jodi Picoult

39. “The magic in new beginnings is truly the most powerful of them all.” - Josiyah Martin

40. “In order to be successful in the new year, stay focused, develop a positive attitude, and be passionate with your dreams.” - Bamigboye Olurotimi

41. “Never tell your resolution beforehand, or it’s twice as onerous a duty.” - John Selden

42. “What a wonderful thought it is that some of the best days of our lives haven't even happened yet.” - Anne Frank

43. “You can get excited about the future. The past won’t mind.” - Hillary DePiano

44. “Though no one can go back and make a brand-new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand-new ending.” - Carl Bard

45. “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.” - Thomas Jefferson

46. “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” - George Eliot

47. “Don’t live the same year 75 times and call it a life.” - Robin Sharma

48. “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.” - Albert Einstein

49. “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” – Seneca

50. “No matter how hard the past, you can always begin again.” - Buddha