Wisdom for the New Year

2005 Labor Day Weekend 033

Photo by Ned Olson

Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Finish Every Day

The old order changeth, yielding place to new, and God fulfils himself in many ways, lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Morte d’Arthur

The discovery of new values in life is a very chaotic experience; there is a tremendous amount of jostling and confusion and a momentary feeling of darkness.

Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands (author’s note)

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters

Old houses mended, cost little less than new before they’re ended.

Colley Cibber

Your public identity is a contract you renew every day.

George DeMarest

The commonplace is shot through with new glory…

Howard Thurman, Deep is the Hunger

If everything were to turn out just like I would want it to, then I would never experience anything new; my life would be an endless repetition of stale successes.

Hugh Prather

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Every person born into this world represents something new…

Martin Buber, The Way of Man

A mind stretched by a new idea can never go back to its original dimensions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

[the poet] unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Idealism

What goals would you be setting for yourself if you knew you could not fail?

Robert Schuller, You Can Become the Person You Want to Be

Each change of many-coloured lite he drew; exhausted worlds, and then imagined new;

Samuel Johnson (of William Shakespeare)

We live our life into a new way of thinking, not think our life into a new way of living.

Steve Buitrago

…there is nothing new under the sun.

The Preacher, Proverbs

Beauty doth varnish age, as if new-born,and gives the crutch the cradle’s infancy.

William Shakespeare, Love’s Labors Lost

Science involves groups of people sharing observations, making predictions, checking the predictions, and then making new and better predictions — all the while living in a universe that tolerates this sort of behavior.

Lucas John Mix, Life in Space

To live communally in silence is to admit a new power into your life.

Kathleen Norris, Dakota

I’ve never learned anything new from someone I agree with.

Dudley Field Malone, The State of Tennessee vs John Thomas Scopes

The more you leave behind, the more room you have to find something new.

William Bridges, Transitions