Happy New Year!

Drop the last year into the silent limbo
of the past.  Let it go, for it was imperfect,
and thank God that it can go.

Brooks Atkinson
   

The conventional Happy New Year approach is to think of the New Year as something
that happens outside of our selves.  It is a good luck wish that the New Year, in some
magical way, will bring us our heart’s desire.  We look to the New Year to make us happy.
When we expect happiness to come to us from the outside, we are usually disappointed.
Happiness is not guaranteed by sunny weather, a raise in pay, a new car, a beautiful home
or anything else of a material nature.  External things are often possessed by very unhappy
people.  Happiness does not come out of a New Year, it comes out of men and women.  Life
does not change when we hang a new calendar on the wall or when the clock strikes midnight
and a New Year begins.  The only way life will change for us is when we change ourselves.

 Wilferd A. Peterson

 

Every new year people make resolutions to change aspects of themselves
they believe are negative.  A majority of people revert back to how
they were before and feel like failures.  This year I challenge you
to a new resolution.  I challenge you to just be yourself.

Aisha Elderwyn
   
  
  
The Old Year has gone.  Let the dead past bury its own dead. 
The New Year has taken possession of the clock of time.   All hail
the duties and possibilities of the coming twelve months!

Edward Payson Powell
  

Every person should be born again on the first day of January.  Start with
a fresh page.  Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let
down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every
person gird him or herself once more, with face to the front, and take
no interest in the things that were and are past.

Henry Ward Beecher
  

New Year's Eve is like every
other night; there is no pause
in the march of the universe,
no breathless moment of
silence among created things
that the passage of another
twelve months may be noted;
and yet no person has quite
the same thoughts this evening
as those that come with the
coming of darkness on other nights.

Hamilton Wright Mabie

  
We will open the book.  Its pages are blank.  We are going
to put words on them ourselves.  The book is called Opportunity
and its first chapter is New Year's Day.

Edith Lovejoy Pierce
   

Today, dear friends, we stand upon the verge of the unknown.  There lies before us the new year and we are going forth to possess it.  Who can tell what we shall find?  What new experiences, what changes shall come, what new needs shall arise?. . . . The land is a land of hills and valleys.  It is not all smooth nor all downhill.  If life were all one dead level, the dull sameness would oppress us; we want the hills and valleys. . .  We cannot tell what loss and sorrow and trial are doing.  Trust only.  The Father comes near to take our hand and lead us on our way today.  It shall be a good, blessed new year!

Lettie B. Cowman
   

   
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

   

It depends on us. . . Another year lies before us like an unwritten page,
an unspent coin, an unwalked road.  How the pages will read,
what treasures will be gained in exchange for time,
or what we find along the way, will largely depend on us.

Esther Baldwin York
   

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

  
   

Then sing, young hearts that are full of cheer,
With never a thought of sorrow;
The old goes out, but the glad young year
Comes merrily in tomorrow.

Emily Miller

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.

Lord Tennyson
   

A new year can begin only because the old year ends.

Madeleine L'Engle
   

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